Transfusion Medicine

The Transfusion Medicine Laboratory provides expert diagnostic, consultative and educational service for patients, physicians, and allied health care providers for the five sites in the Hamilton region, as well as partner hospitals across the Hamilton Niagara Haldiman Brant LHIN.

There is a Transfusion Medicine Laboratory at each acute care site: Hamilton General Hospital, Juravinski Hospital, McMaster University Medical Centre, and St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. There are four faculty members, and three technical specialists working within these laboratories. These laboratories operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and provide over 200,000 blood and blood components to patients in the Hamilton Region.

Transfusion Medicine is also involved in testing new methodologies, has several automated blood dispensing devices in clinical areas located at the Juravinski site, the Hamilton General site and St. Joseph’s Healthcare. The Transfusion Medicine Lab at McMaster Hospital is the Hub site for performing all remote testing for the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital satellite site.

HLA Laboratory

The focus of the HLA Laboratory is tissue typing for bone marrow and renal (both live and deceased donor) transplants. The principle areas of testing are antibody specificity, human leukocyte antigen (HLA) matching, cross matching, and antibody investigations.

The laboratory is located at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. The HLA laboratory includes a head of service, medical directors, medical laboratory technologists and medical laboratory assistants.

This laboratory is predominantly a daytime operation, but provides 24/7 on-call coverage for deceased donor typing.

Stem Cell

The Stem Cell Laboratory is part of the Transfusion Medicine Department. It is a full capacity, accredited laboratory that provides hematopoietic progenitor cells for the management of patients undergoing allogeneic and autologous bone marrow transplants. The laboratory is accredited by the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT) and is licenses by Health Canada.

This laboratory is located at the Juravinski Hospital and has a team of specially trained Transfusion Medicine technologists and a Technical Specialist.

Stem Cell laboratory cryopreserves over 130 transplant patients per year, 90% are for autologous, 10% are allogeneic. The TM lab handles hematopoietic progenitor cell products and bone marrow products for over 65 allogeneic transplant patients.

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