BLOOD TYPING ISSUES

Blood typing procedure is one of the most easily understandable, short turn around time procedure in a clinical laboratory. As easy as it may seem, releasing wrong blood type result could be a very very serious problem and would revoke your license as a laboratory scientist for life.

The same issue happened this morning in my laboratory. An indian outpatient requested for a blood typing procedure to be done on his blood. I did the procedure and had doubts about the result of his RH reaction. I called up my senior to confirm if its negative or positive. My senior affirmed to me that the tiny agglutination (almost not visible) is  a  positive result. Being confident on the result, I typed it in and released the result. Suddenly, the patient complained since he know he was a Rh negative.

My world suddenly stopped as he showed his ID to me to prove that he is an RH negative. My doubts on the blood type should be dealt more skeptically and I regret not doing further confirmatory test on the blood just because of my senior's opinion.  I can't also blame my senior since our RH reagent is known to be weakly-reacting and they bore with it for almost a year. I tried to convince them to use the tube method and employ antihuman globulins as part of the frequently ordered reagents but the laboratory's culture seemed to disregard my opinion.

Lesson learned: I will take time to confirm doubtful results and would depend much on my own learnings since  my license and integrity is at stake.