Transfusion Medicine

Department of Transfusion Medicine (Blood Bank) is a service with state-of-the-art facilities, as per the drug and cosmetic’s act, India. It is equipped to collect and process whole blood and its components like packed red cells, random platelets, fresh frozen plasma, cryoprecipitate, granulocytes and cryo poor plasma. Leuco filtration of the products like red cells and platelets can be done to prevent and reduce transfusion reaction to the patients.

The immunohematology lab at SIMS Hospital – Vadapalani, Chennai is fully automatized to do grouping and typing, Cross matching and various specialized test to detect unknown antibodies. The SIMS Hospital Blood Bank is one of the few centres in India to do infection screening procedures with advanced methods like chemiluminescence (CLIA) and nucleic acid test (NAT). This method reduces the incubation period of virus like HIV, HBV and HCV in blood donor and increase the safety of blood transfusion to the patients.

One of the important aspects of SIMS Hospital Blood Bank is apheresis platform, where a cell separator is used to collect required components like platelets, stem cells, granulocytes and lymphocytes from the donor. Apheresis products are mainly used for treating oncology and transplant patients in order to reduce the number of transfusions and improve the quality of treatment.