What are the practices in your facilities as to whom blood and blood products can be dispensed to?:confused:

LPN's and RN's as well as any physician (never happens) who would come to get the blood.

Any nursing personnel which includes ward clerk and nursing aide--but have to have been trained.

Same as Bill. We have RN's, LPN's, PCA's, and ward clerks checking out blood - with training. Docs never come...but could.

Many large institutions have transporters (or some variant thereof) who also p/u and deliver blood products . . . they need to be trained for such.

We also have adult volunteers. We have computer based training for all persons who transport blood products.

At my current Hospital, we will dispense it to "trained" Transporters or Nurses (a read-back is performed). We are soon moving to what I have done in 2 other Hospitals where I worked; that is sending the blood to the Nursing units through the pneumatic tube. So there will be no read-back on our end (but will still occur at the Nursing end).

At 1 Institution I worked at (not described above),only Nurses could pick up blood products. Now I would like to say that would help ensure that any "errors" were caught at issue. But sadly, their knowledge about blood products, blood types, antibodies/ antigens and attributes can be very limited. For example, I recall 1 Tech Issuing a unit of RBCs to a patient that required Irradiated blood. The unit was CMV-, but not Irradiated. I know the Tech. should have caught that, but when I questioned the Nurse as to why they did not catch it, his response was that he thought CMV- was the same as Irradiated. Sad but true. I inserviced new Nurses coming to that Institution and I spent a lot of time describing the different products; what they are used for; and attributes such as Leukoreduced, CMV-, Irradiated, hemoglobin S negative, Antigen Negative, HLA Typed, etc.

Brenda Hutson, CLS(ASCP)SBB