Blood Bank

Facilities and services

We have facilities for bleeding donors daily after preliminary screening and physical examination. Refreshments are provided to the donors after blood donation and a certificate is provided to each of them.

Equipments available are Blood collection monitors for bleeding and collecting blood from the donors. Refrigerated centrifuge, Plasma expresser and Laminar air flow for blood component separation into packed red blood cells and platelet rich plasma and fresh frozen plasma. Component separation was commenced in the year 2000 and our hospital Blood bank is the first to commence component separation in the Indian Railways.

We have deep freezers to store the fresh frozen plasma at -50 degree C  which can be stored for one year and a walk in cooler to store the packed red blood cells which can be stored for 45 days and whole blood at 2-8 degree C for 35 days. We have platelet agitator and incubator for storing platelets for a period of five days.

An Immunohematology analyser was procured in 2015 which can perform blood grouping and cross matching automatically within half an hour. Previously these procedures were done manually which takes more than an hour. We are currently doing 9500 blood grouping and cross matches per year and 7500 antibody screenings per year. We have also identified Bombay blood group and H lectin and A1 lectin were performed in our Blood bank for three times in the past ten years.

In addition we have centrifuges, hot air ovens, incubator and water bath to perform the ancillary procedures.

We store upto 500 to 600 plasma bags at any given time and 500 packed red blood cell units and whole blood. 120 Platelet units can be stored at any given time.

About 600 donors donate blood in a month. We issue around 300 to 450 units per month to departments like cardiothoracic surgery, Cardiology, Orthopedics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Neurosurgery, Nephrology, Gastroenterology, Surgery, Medicine and Pediaytrics.