3 July 2025 (Thursday) - BTLP-TACT Exercise

On the last day of last month (three days ago) I wrote on here: “That’s eight BTLP-TACT exercises I’ve done this month… I bet I get an email whinging about my low involvement by the end of the week”. That email came at two o’clock this afternoon…

 

So here we go again. I was presented with one case – a sixty-two year-old woman needing four units of blood right away for a GI bleed.

The ABO group was indeterminate. The cell group was B; the serum group AB. But the Rh group was negative. That’s one for NHSBT.

The antibody panel was positive in cells 1 and 2 so I requested antibody panels. The IAT and enzyme panels were positive in cells 1, 2 and 3 corresponding with anti-D but not excluding anti Cw

I issued four units of O Rh(D) Negative blood.

 

I got it right.

1 July 2025 (Tuesday) - Competency Assessment

I was asked if I might produce a series of slides for competency assessments. I was rather happy to do so… it’s easier said than done though.

How many slides do we need? I went for twenty, but at five minutes per slide that’s going to take two hours per assessment.

What cases should we cover? What cases have we got in the teaching slides… Has anyone sorted the teaching slides for a while?

Back in the day I compiled a series of teaching slides by sticking what I considered to be an interesting case into a slide tray with a plan to sort it later… and I would forget about it. So consequently when I came to sort the myriad of slides I’d piled up I had a few dozen cases of iron deficient anaemia, a few dozen cases of CLL, and a few dozen slides with frankly horrific looking blast cells. All of which were rather faded.

Fortunately we had quite a variety of cases in the teaching slides. I’ve managed to get eight different slides which are predominantly red cell issues, eight which are predominantly white cell issues, one thrombocytosis, one thrombocytopenia, one with clumps, and one unremarkable one.

Getting a selection was tricky. Now I’ve got to come up with standard (correct) answers…

I quite like making myself useful like this…