Does your facility use tissue in the OR? Who is responsible for ordering, storage, issuing, documenting, etc., etc., etc.? Is it maintained in the Blood Bank or the OR?

We have a Tissue Coordinator who is an OR nurse who's responsible for the ordering and recieveing and most of the documentation. OR stores all room temperature products, blood bank only stores frozen tissue/bone as we have a -75 C freezer. For these products only do we issue on a paper ledger to the OR when needed- otherwise they are the OR's responsiblity. It has worked out good for us, but we are fortunate to have a really capable person as the tissue coordinator.

Same process here. OR nursing coordinates all aspects of tissue. We hold some tissue for them in one of our monitored refregerators as they do not have a monitored refrigerator yet.

OR has responsibility for tissues at our hospital. Their bone freezer, minus 70 degrees, resides in our lab due to space constraints in the OR.

The only thing we do is change the graph on the freezer every week for them and call them when/if the alarm sounds.

We get stuck with most of the regulatory parts of tissues because Joint Commission has a big tissue section in the Lab standards as well as in the hospital ones. We also enter all tissues into our computer for tracking even though we only store the frozen ones in BB. The biggest nightmare is for nursing to track the lot #'s of the saline and antibiotics that they use when they prepare a tissue. Also JC requires documentation of every step in the process of tissue moving about the hospital--including package integrity checks. We are putting in for capital for tissue management software because it is such a nightmare to maintain compliance. BB also monitors all the temps of the Rm temp tissues plus what is in our freezer and fridge. There are getting to be more and more tissues used all the time. JC considers even animal tissues (like pig skin) as falling under their standards although I think that FDA does not.

Our OR deals with all of their tissues and related issues (storage, etc).

All tissue is handled by the OR. I consult some to help them be compliant with the regs.

We handle the frozen and refrigerated stuff and OR handles the other stuff. They are having a tough time grasping all the implications of the regs, so I work with them when asked. They have an assigned tissue coordinator. I take care of things on our end (BB supervisor). The medical director of Blood Bank is also the medical director of record for tissues.