Serological best practices

Our goal is to share best practices with hospitals and health-care providers to optimize patient care and utilization of blood products. These best practices support serological and immunohematology investigations and the selection of donor units for transfusion.

Some chronically transfused patients, as well as patients with pan-reactive antibodies, multiple antibodies or antibodies to high incidence antigens, may benefit from transfusion of red blood cells that are phenotypically similar to their own. In these circumstances, hospital transfusion services may select antigen-negative units from their inventory or may request antigen-negative units from their blood operator, if appropriate.

Canadian Blood Services performs extended donor phenotype and genotype testing to assist physicians in providing antigen-negative red blood cells to patients with complex serological phenotypes. Canadian Blood Services also provides reference services for immunohematology testing in several provincial reference laboratories and a National Immunohematology Reference Laboratory.