Understanding the Blood Donation Process

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Tony and I work for Stanford Blood Center. Today, I will discuss how we process our blood. First, when we receive the blood here, it comes in these coolers. Different kinds of coolers come from different areas. Here we have a tag which tells us what time they started drawing the blood. This is a little basic information so that we can prioritize the units and triage them. Here we have blood that has just been donated from donors. They wrap it up nicely for us. There is a certain way that they need to wrap it. Basically, this just came from a donor, so what the Medical Records Department does is they put the information into the computer. Then, we, the laboratory, access that and we process it. So, we'll take out this unit of blood, and we'll find out, via the computer, everything that we need to do with this unit. We will use all of these labels here depending on what type of products we are going to make out of it. We prepare it. We balance the units. We usually balance two at a time, to make sure that they are within certain perimeters of each other. Then, we go over to the centrifuge, where we place the units. Now, the centrifuge is similar to a dishwasher. What it does is when you put the units into the canisters, which swivel out; it spins them at 4000 r.p.ms for approximately seven minutes. It doesn't immediately stop spinning after; it is allowed to slow down on its own. Once, the centrifuge stops spinning, you are left with three layers, including the whole blood that we initially received. It looks something like this, the plasma is on the top, next is a very thin line of white blood cells and the red blood cells are on the bottom. Spinning the unit causes the red blood cells, since they are heavier, to sink to the bottom of the bag or towards the edge of the centrifugation. After we have finished spinning it, we have to express it, or separate the plasma from the red blood cells. We have these robots that will do that for us. We also have manual expressers. We place the units on the front of this machine and place the tubing through the proper places. It then separates the plasma from the red blood cells. At the top of the machine, we put the anticoagulants and nutrients into the bag. We seal the bag, record the information into the computer system and distribute the products to where they need to go. That is the process until the laboratory sends it somewhere else."