What guidelines do hospital Transfusion Services use to validate blood products transported in a Pneumatic Tube System?
A colleague at a hospital in Minnesota reports that they have had a pneumatic tube system in place for about three years, and that they have been using it for lab specimens and pharmacy items. They are looking at using the pneumatic tube to transport blood and blood products to the Operating room. They have not seen any guidelines for validation of a pneumatic tube system for transport of blood products. The Minnesotan reports that they will contact their Biomed dept to see if they received validation guidelines at the time of initial installation of this system. In the meantime, the inquiring colleague wonders if others have developed pneumatic tube blood transport validation guidelines.
Editor's NOTE: The information from an earlier forum issue on this subject (Dec. 2002) is germane to this discussion, and merits review. Colleagues are encouraged to provide their input/experience in response to the above question.
The following comments have been received.
ADDENDA May 5, 2005
- A colleague in Ontario, Canada (at a 395 bed community hospital) reports that they will soon be installing a pneumatic tube system to deliver patient samples and also blood products between their laboratory and an oncology clinic. They will be performing validation on the tube system before it is put into use. However, given the conditions during their winter season, she wants to know "How do you ensure that the blood products have not been exposed to temperatures below 0 C?" They report having looked at the Safe-T-Vue indicator, the HemoTemp II Indicator, along with the WarmMark and ColdMark indicators. She thinks that several temperature indicators are suitable for validating that the blood product has not exceeded a temperature of 10 C, however she has only found one commercially available indicator that shows if the unit has been exposed to temperatures less than 1 C. According to the guidelines for pneumatic tube delivery systems published by the AABB in 2004 "glass-tube min-max thermometers may be too fragile to use in a carrier or their plastic slides may move due to vibration or centrifugal force". The indicators that she has found to validate the minimum temperature appear to be glass-tube type indicators. She realizes that digital data loggers would solve this problem but they are looking for a more "economical" method of validation. She asks for input that others might offer.
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