Blood transfusion kits, the cornerstone to a walking blood bank

Continuing from the last post we talked about the need for a walking blood bank and some of how you should prep for it. But, next, we have to talk about the blood transfusion kits themselves.

You can get kits from a few different sources IF you have a required medical license. North American Rescue used to list their blood kits on their website. But they are reworking them and only distributors can order them currently. I have ordered these before for people and have one on hand I show at classes. So let’s talk about it here.

Here is how the bag comes from NAR. This is the basic kit that they offer. The basic kit doesn’t have blood tubes and a few other things that we honestly won’t be using. I would plus this kit up with an Eldon card or two. These do have an expiration date on the bag for the earliest expiring piece of the kit. So just keep that in mind. But these should be good for a little bit past their expiration date if stored correctly (dry, cool, and dark), not medical advice, just my uneducated opinion.

I would argue this is the most important part of the kit outside of the blood bag itself. This is a blood donation questionnaire similar to the one you fill out any time you donate blood to the horrible organization Red Cross. What the military does with these is they have these (not the ones in the kits) prefilled out by everyone and kept on file in the aid station or treatment clinic. This allows for quick screening when you need a lot of blood in a hurry. You should probably have a few of these on hand and I have added a version of these to the resource library.

The next piece is the donor bag. This mostly contains administrative things for gaining iv access with the blood transfusion bag. It also contains a label for marking the transfusion bag. I would add an Eldon card to this bag.

The recipient bag contains similar stuff to what’s in the donor bag but includes catheters for the administration of the transfusion bag.

This is the only part of the bag that REQUIRES extra equipment. This is the admin set or the iv tubing used with the transfusion bag. It is a filtered y tubing that requires the use of a small (100m