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…