12 October 2026 (Monday) - BTLP-TACT Exercise

Time for a BTLP-TACT exercise. I was (eventually) presented with two cases:
 

51761 – a seventy-two year-old chap needing group and save

He grouped as O Rh(D) Positive with a negative antibody screen

98771 – a fifty-nine year-old woman also needing group and save

She also grouped as O Rh(D) Positive but with antibody screen weakly positive in cells 2 & 3. I performed antibody panels. Both the enzyme and IAT panels were negative in cells 1 & 2 and positive in all other cells corresponding with anti-c, but I was unable to exclude anti – Lu(a) as it doesn’t feature on the antigram of the screen, and also unable to exclude anti-Kp(a)

 
I got the thumbs down… anti-E was also masked… I saw that - why didn't I write it down?

10 October 2026 (Saturday) - Platelet Refractoriness

Platelet transfusions don’t always do the trick. You gave a full adult dose, ABO-compatible, straight off the agitator, room temperature the whole way, and the post-transfusion count looks almost identical to the pre-transfusion count. So do you carry on stuffing in more platelets?

Here’s a treatise on the matter.

 

6 October 2026 (Tuesday) - Fritsma Factor Update

The latest update from the nice people at the Fritsma Factor arrived in my in-box today.

As always there was quite a bit of useful stuff.

Haemophilia in women… we don’t often think about that…

 

6 October 2026 (Tuesday)- -UKAS Update

Here’s the latest update from the UK Accreditation Service. It’s rather dry and at first sight might well (quite frankly) seem to be meaningless gibberish. I told them this (rather politely) a couple of months ago and they never even replied.

I’ve found that if you copy the entire lot into Chat GPT and ask it to translate into everyday English it becomes a tad more comprehensible. It actually becomes rather sensible.

That’s what winds me up about quality management. It is *such* a good idea but is couched in mystery. Why do people do this with it?

3 October 2026 (Saturday) - IgA Deficiency

The whole reason that we do CPD is to stay abreast of latest developments. And there is no field in which there are no end of developments quite like there is with blood transfusion.

Here’s the latest thinking on IgA deficiency…

 

30 September 2026 (Wednesday) - BTLP-TACT Exercise

As it is the end of the month I thought I might as well do a BTLP-TACT exercise if only to keep the engagement level up.

I had one case – a ninety-two year-old chap needing four units of blood prior to surgery. 

He grouped as O Rh(D) Positive with a negative antibody screen.

I selected four units of O Rh(D) Positive blood

 

I got it right. Having done six exercises this month the software says I’m currently meeting my engagement targets… I wonder why it keeps sending me emails saying that I’m not…

29 September 2026 (Tuesday) - IBMS Newsletter

It was with something of a sense of frustration that I received the IBMS newsletter today. Having received it in four different emails, the works IT refused to open it as it originated from outside its own domain.

I eventually got the thing open – you can read it by clicking here (hopefully). Much of it was irrelevant to me, but two items made me think.

There was an article about embracing automation… This is clearly the way forward, but when I first started people were fighting tooth and nail against automation. There was supposedly some merit by doing everything in the most laborious, time consuming, expensive and imprecise way possible (or so it was ranted at me by so many people).

But I saw red when I read about “Pathology Transformation: Building a sustainable workforce”. This is a standard management catchphrase which has been trotted out ever since we as a profession decided not to build a sustainable workforce but to hope to have a workforce educate and train itself, and then pretended to be surprised when in the large part it didn’t work. (I’ve ranted about this before).