As part of a reference investigation of obstetric patients with antibodies. a full Rh phenotype has historically been performed twice in each pregnancy. In these times of working to tighter budgets we are trying to rationalise the work we do. The Rh types are performed on an IH100 . For non obstetric patient we would perform one automated extended type and, as long as the result was an automatic transfer to the LIMs, we would use the result as our baseline phenotype. Does anyone know of any reason why we should repeat CcEe typing for each pregnancy and going further why we would need to do it twice?

NO!

Unless the lady has had a haemopoietic stem cell transplant of course!

Thanks. That's what I thought but as we have always done it thought I should check if there was some reason I was unaware of. It probably dates back to when we used polyclonal reagents that were less reliable.

2 hours ago, catm said:

Thanks. That's what I thought but as we have always done it thought I should check if there was some reason I was unaware of. It probably dates back to when we used polyclonal reagents that were less reliable.

Yes, it did, but actually, in those days you could still group the person once, as long as you used two different sources of your polyclonal reagents.