About Our Procedures
These procedures are for the use of students who are using the case studies and for laboratories which are adopting new procedures and developing their procedure manuals. They are in Microsoft Word format, and, as such, can be downloaded and altered.
For the student these procedures are the basis for many of the answers to the case study questions. For example, if a case study asks “What additional rule out cells tests must be tested?”, the answer is based on the ”Investigation of a Positive Antibody Detection Test” procedure posted here. Note that laboratories may follow different policies and procedures than these, and that such different policies and procedures might lead to different answers.
For the laboratory seeking to expand its test menu, these procedures are offered as a point of departure. There are different, equally valid, or even superior, ways to write procedures and ways to do immunohematologic testing. The III does not take responsibility for the validity of these procedures given different local circumstances, different test methods, and different reagent sources. All procedures MUST BE VALIDATED by the laboratory that is seeking to implement them. Multiple resources must be consulted as part of such implementation. But it is easier to start from some basis rather than from a “blank page”. We hope that these procedures will provide a starting point for laboratories to expand their competencies. The basis for a good laboratory is a procedure manual that accurately describes how procedures are to be performed. Such a manual is the basis for training new staff, measuring individual worker’s competence, discovering what has gone wrong when results prove inadequate and how performance may be improved, and, in general, providing for quality patient care.
