How Are Blood Donations Stored?

Video Transcript

"The next step, after we have already processed the blood, is we'll freeze some of it. However, the red blood cells are placed into the refrigerator. Now, I will show you the frozen part. The unit is placed into our heavy duty freezer, called the Blast freezer. This is designed to freeze the products really quickly because some of those products cannot be frozen slowly. If they are, ice crystals may form inside and destroy some of those proteins or different types of things like that may happen. Now, I will show you some of the products that we have already prepared. All of our frozen products, if we ship them or if they are transfusable, for example, when shipping them to the hospital, will be sent on dry ice. This, for example, is one of the plasmas that we pulled off earlier. We wrap it up and put it into a plastic bag. This will then be in our freezers until the hospital orders it. We send it in a small cooler with dry ice. The plasma will be thawed out and used on a patient. We have two different kinds of units, which are the red cells and the frozen products. The frozen products, like plasma or transfusable plasma, are used for basically two purposes. If the patient has been losing a lot of volume, it is used to replace some of that volume. This called a volume expander. Another thing is, plasma has a coagulation or clotting factors in it and it helps to stop the bleeding. We also make another product from the plasma. If we can't make it transfusable or maybe pull any part of it to make it transfusable, we make an intermediate product called a SC. What we'll get from that is a cryoprecipitator, special clotting factors. Factor VIII or anti-hemophilia factors. This package is very small, but it has very concentrated clotting factors. It is for people who have unique problems with bleeding. We also have non-transfusable products, such as, 24 hour product and 120 hour product. This is used more for research. We send that to other companies. Although, it is a degraded product, we still have use for it. I'll show you the red cells over here. We put the red blood cell in the refrigerator after they are separated from the plasma. These have leukocytes, or white blood cells, which most of the time, we take out of the red blood cells. We do this because those cells will cause a lot of reactions in patients. Patients need red bloods usually because they have lost a lot of blood and they need to replace it. So, we'll store it here for now. Later on we?ll dock the filter through them to filter out the white blood cells, or the leukocytes. Once they are filtered, they are label and ready to go to the hospital. Maybe I will show you the distribution part of this process next."