Blood banking in the small hospital.

This represents an attempt to briefly outline the type of blood bank and transfusion service we at Montrose Memorial Hospital have developed and utilized to supply our blood needs. Basically it is a system based on a fairly large list of known, pretested, and available donors who can be contacted quickly to supply blood upon demand. Only bare minimum stock supplies are maintained. The major problem is waste of blood, but Montrose experience continues to fall below the average for rural areas. Although the starting and maintaining of this walking blood bank was and is a complicated involved, and somewhat tedious process, we have been happy with the results and have been able to supply in an adequate fashion the blood requirements of an isolated yet extremely active population with a sophisticated medical community.