Interview With a Red Top

If you draw blood, proper tube handling is important if the lab has any hope of extracting an accurate test result from the blood inside. With advice from Randy Red Top, one of the most commonly used blood collection tubes, this video continues our "If Tubes Could Talk" series. He's a little grumpy, but the advice he offers on how long he takes to clot, centrifugation time and speed, stability and preserving potassium results to be worth a listen.

Content time codes:
0:00---Intro
0-:56---What Red Tops do
1:21---Why Red Tops yield serum instead of plasma
1:52----What is fibrin?
3:04---How centrifugation yields serum
3:28---Other tubes the yield serum
3:43---Why you must wait 20-30 minutes for clotting to take place
4:51----What happens when red tops are spun too soon
5:10---Why red tops have a clot activator and not a clot accelerator
5:46---Why you shouldn't spin tubes twice
7:12---Why you can't refrigerate a red top before centrifugation
7:-50---What if the red top doesn't have a gel?
8:00---Are red tops the most important tube?
8:28---Why red tops are no longer the first tube in the order of draw
9:23---Why a change in the order of draw was necessary when red tops started being made of plastic.
10:51---If you increase the RPM, why can't you speed up the centrifugation?
11: 53---What is the proper RCF (g-force) for red tops?

Interview with a BLUE Top:    • Interview With a BlueTop  

For a newly released video on Preventing Preanalytical Errors, visit https://www.phlebotomy.com/preanalyti...

For a downloadable PDF of "If Tubes Could Talk," visit https://www.phlebotomy.com/TTP-if-tub...

For more phlebotomy educational materials, visit www.phlebotomy.com.