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 (100ml) Normal Saline bag to wet the filter. You have to use this tubing. Any other non-filtered tubing will allow clots to pass into the recipient. That can be extremely dangerous if not downright deadly.

The bread and butter of this entire kit, and what I know most of you have been waiting for so far. This is the transfusion bag. It has an anticoagulant (citrate phosphate) in it to keep the blood from clotting. This anticoagulant will suck the calcium out of your blood which is why when you add in blood transfusions the lethal triad becomes the lethal rhombus because hypocalcemia can affect, you guessed it, coagulopathy. It has a 14 gauge needle attached to the tubing for rapid collection. Now, here comes a slight problem. How do you measure the volume of the blood collected? The bag is meant for 450 mL of blood. If you get too far away from the amount in either direction you will end up with either too much anticoagulant or not enough. Either one can be extremely dangerous for the casualty. When you donate blood for a blood drive, they normally use a scale to make sure they have the correct amount of blood in the bag. Well, we don’t have the space for adding in a scale just for measuring blood (although it might be smart to keep one in your clinic area). So medics have gotten creative. One method is the take 10 inches of paracord and loosely wrap it around the bag width-wise using medical tape sticky side up to retain the tape. When the paracord pops off of the tape you are within 15 ml of 450 mL of blood and you can stop the collection. Another is to use a cable tie of 6.5 inches on the long access of the bag. This will only allow the specified amount to go into the bag. Not any more.

Now with the kit covered, one thing I do want to announce, is that I am offering these on a special order basis on the website. The price will be $95 plus shipping. These are not something I keep in stock regularly so keep in mind that there will be a delay between when you order the kits and when I am able to ship them out.