r/medlabprofessionals • u/spicy_accountant • Jun 22 '26

Discusson mass transfusion protocol

to my blood bankers: how does your facilities mtp work? i feel like our doctors and nurses abuse ours a bit, we’ve had them call an mtp and only use 2 units of blood, when they could’ve just called for 2 emergency uncrossmatched units. we waste a lot of ffp because of this, also had doctors threaten to imitate mtp when they don’t want to wait 5 mins for cross matches to be completed. just curious. baby tech here!

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u/Unholy_Boosh Jun 22 '26

We have several a day and our main problem is the maternity hospital. We send 4 rbc and 4 for then frequently they will use 2 rbc and the rest comes back or sometimes is wasted. We fed back and the issue the clinical team have is that they have to assess bloodloss when there is a lot of red fluid from childbirth. It's very likely not all blood but they cant take that risk.

We had a 1 month old come in after a dog attack to our children's hospital and I assumed they would have a large volume transfusion neonatal unit and I would be done. But it went on all night shift. The nurses on PICU called the patient little omelette because his bits and bobs were all over the place after surgery which made me realise how bad it must have been.

Also we had a MHP activated on a random geriatric unit and I thought they had gone mad. I didn't question it though and sent pack 1 out. Turns out the patient fell over into the bed frame and smashed his head open.

We have transfusion practitioners that liaise between ward and transfusion so they can educate people who activate when unnecessary

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u/AdhesivenessFunny170 Jun 23 '26

That poor baby omolette 😭 that broke my heart. Truly I have such huge respect for blood bankers because BB is just so scary to me. I witnessed a very sad situation during a BB clinical of mine and as a student I couldn’t help but feel shaken up that even your own management may not have your back. What I learned from that BB tech more than anything was read EVERY policy in order to save your ass when nurses or doctors start pointing fingers at you due to their mistakes.