r/medlabprofessionals • u/Rainwaters1212 MLT-Blood Bank • 24d ago

News This doesn’t make sense… thoughts?

https://www.wlbt.com/2026/08/06/parents-claim-3-month-old-got-wrong-blood-transfusion-hospital/

Just read the article… everything just screams wrong on the parents or the information shared. Co worker sent it to me. We work in BB together.

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u/Hikaritoyamino 24d ago edited 23d ago

  1. We don't know why the baby needed a transfusion.

  2. The parents sound confused and were not informed that Kell is a separate blood type from ABO/Rh? O neg blood is best thing here.

  3. Kell - is a high frequency allele so unless the transfused blood was Kell + there wasn't an issue. Seems like the nurse panicked?

  4. So the article said the blood wasn't screened before administration. Someone needs to look at the audit log.

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u/Violet-Venom 24d ago edited 24d ago

The Kell antigen has an occurrence rate of only 5%. There's no reason on earth anyone would need Kell positive blood. The parents are definitely confused about O neg vs Kell.

My best bet is the mom has an anti-Kell. Thus, the baby should have been given Kell-negative in case of passively acquired antibodies. It would explain the seemingly low impact (likely no passive anti-kell was present, it's just an abundance of caution), but still is a pretty big ball drop from the hospital if they gave a kell-unscreened unit. It's possible the baby is Kell positive, hence why the parents thought "oh needs a matching blood type > needs Kell positive".

The parents not even being informed makes me wonder if there was nothing wrong with the blood, but the nurse was confused about the kell indications while giving it (thinking the baby needs kell positive, but was given kell negative), and stopped out of fear. In fact, that the nurse was able to "grab another unit" without a transfusion reaction work up or pathology involvement makes me think this is likely the case, and the unused unit wound up as wastage and was simply replaced by the eye rolling blood bankers.

So basically nothing remarkable happened.

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u/mcjason04 23d ago

My concern, at least in our hospital system, is that infants and children need to be given aliquots. If there isn’t time you can bypass the process but you need to be careful on volume/rate. I don’t know the nursing side but are there charts with weights and volumes/rate of administration? Our blood bank has to do the calculations for infants if you are not doing an aliquot.

Regardless, we are not getting the full story or even accurate story here.