10 November 2023 (Friday) - BTLP-TACT Exercise

Time for another BTLP-TACT exercise. I was presented with two cases:

 

33627 – a sixty-three year old woman in theatre requiring two units of blood within two hours.

She grouped as A but with an indeterminate Rh group. BUT the positive control in the group made the entire group uninterpretable. I made this mistake in July, didn’t I?

So I reported everything as uninterpretable.

The antibody screen was positive in cells 1 and 2.

The IAT panel was positive in cells 1, 2, 5, 8 and 9 which corresponded with anti-M but didn’t exclude anti-Cw or anti Lu(a).

The enzyme panel was negative in everything which did exclude anti-Cw

Anti-Kp(a) was excluded by the screen

I issued two units of O Rh(D) Negative which were M negative. They weren’t labelled as Lu(a), but that’s why we crossmatch.

  

70760 – a fifty-six year old woman also in theatre requiring four units of blood tomorrow. 

She grouped as O Rh(D) Negative with a negative antibody screen.

I selected four units of O Rh(D) Negative

 

I got the thumbs down. Apparently anti-Lu(a) could have been excluded… Could it? I don’t think so. Better to get the red light for erring on the side of caution, eh?