Articles

Through communications with our clients, CTS is aware of the current national blood shortage. We realize this situation makes it even more critical that we report your results on time. While most test result reporting delays are CTS’ responsibility, there are ways you can help reduce delays.

We have noted that some test result delays are associated with an inadequate donor sample set. The two primary causes are when only two tubes instead of three are submitted for routine donations or when three tubes instead of four are submitted for donations requiring Babesia testing. Another scenario that causes delays is when three tubes are submitted but one is unacceptable for testing, which could be due to low fill volume, a serum tube that isn’t clotted, or an EDTA tube with micro-clots. These scenarios require the donor testing laboratories to share a tube between testing platforms, which adds significant time to complete testing. All these scenarios cause test result reporting delays of up to 12 hours.

We suggest a reminder to staff that, especially during this critical shortage of blood products nationally, it is very important to completely fill the required number of sample tubes and to completely mix the filled tubes to ensure sample acceptability is attained.

We are developing improved client reports that will indicate the number of inadequate donor sets submitted by your facility, so that you can assess the frequency of these problems. The new report will be available for July testing data per request.
 

Impact to the Clients: 

• Donor tube sets that do not contain the appropriate number of tubes will delay the release of test results.
• Donor tube sets that include partially filled tubes will delay the release of test results.
• Donor tube sets that are not appropriately mixed after collection could delay the release of test results.

Client Action Required:

• We suggest a reminder to staff that it is very important to completely fill the appropriate number of donor tubes.
• We suggest a reminder to staff that it is very important to completely mix the filled tubes to ensure an acceptable sample for testing.

Contact your CSM with any questions!