Question to everyone: When you need to culture a component for a transfusion reaction, does the microbiology department obtain the specimen from the bag and innoculate the media, or does the blood bank do this?

Micro staff - at every place I have ever worked

Microbiology does the set up, they don't trust us Blood Bankers!

Microbiology, they are the experts

Steve

Microbiology here as well.

It's so rare Thank goodness. We do it at the Blood Bank just as we do the plt cultures......:mad:we don't trust them

Our microbiology department do it

Most of our reactions take place on off shifts when our small lab is manned by three or fewer "multi talented" multi tasking generalists. The culture is set up by the tech who is working in the blood bank area (unless he can coerce one of the others on his shift into doing it!) as there is no dedicated micro tech during those hours.

Microbiology does the culture should it happen on day shift. On other shifts there would be a generalist covering the micro dept.

Don

Microbiology

Microbiology does the culture should it happen on day shift. On other shifts there would be a generalist covering the micro dept.

Don

This is what we do.

Microbiology

I would say the choice of who does it is going to be largely dependent on A) having an adequate 'clean' area and media on hand to avoid introducing contamination on the front end and whether you are having ongoing problems with cultures returning positives you cant synch up with clinical outcomes/expected patterns. We had longstanding issues with culturing CT products and having positives come back that were non-reproducible (repeat cultures on backup vials coming back either negative or different ID). We did an investigation of all parts of our culture process and found some things that surprised us. For instance our cultures are broths held for 14 days and micro was doing blind subs at multiple points to plate media since they did not have confidence in being able to distinguish growth solely by eye. They are now subbed out only on day 12 (unless there is suspicious appearance) so they can be finalized on day 14 as neg. We have our own biosafety hoods so we were able to innoculate our own media. Our positive rate is now easily 1% or less from these 2 changes. We had tried other measures like having the micro intake tech change to sterile gloves and amphyll the work surface before subbing our cultures but this was not successful in reducing rates. I guess bottom line is - its more cost and labor effective to let the pros do it, but if you're having problems dont be afraid to walk around and ask people how they actually do things.

Microbiology.