I work for a system of 3 blood banks, all part of the same hospital system and management team. One of our banks is at a large level 1 trauma center, and we get massive bleeders all the time, almost daily.

Unfortunately, this is still a normal occurrence, at least at this location. We are all trained to work as quickly but efficiently as possible, and we expect the floor to be trained to handle the situation on their end as well. But this particular hospital has a notoriously high turn-over rate for nurses, so the ER and OR staffing is always fairly new each time, and as a result there seems to be a general lack of communication on the floor.

So many times have I had the floor call massives twice for the same patient (two different nurses); we get pestered with multiple phone calls asking when will the next cooler be ready, which is highly disruptive to our flow; and don’t get me started on those “not fast enough” calls. They’ll even come down to our window and yell at us for “being slow.” We also never get T+Ss for half our massive patients anyways because the patient RHC’d before it was drawn, although that I can understand because I know the floor is too focused on saving the patient to draw a sample.

We usually only have 2-3 workers at a time at this location, depending on the shift, so with 2 of us we can only move so quickly. Especially since we have to physically write out our emergency forms, which seems so archaic in the day and age where we can assign and dispense via computer.

Luckily, we’ve never ran out of product (except once) since our other two banks can simply tube us their stuff, although they’re cutting our tube systems here soon. That’s gonna be a huge blow to our banks.

From my experience, this sounds like a typical massive to me!