Hello and welcome back to the Small Animal Clinical podcast brought to you from the Royal Veterinary College in London.

My name is always is Shane and Jassani.

Today on the podcast I'm joined by a long-time friend and colleague Karen Hum, who as you can tell is making me laugh already.

So Karen is a lecturer in emergency and critical care here at the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals and the co-director of the Transfusion Service here.

So thanks very much for joining me today, Karen.

And we're going to promise a delegate's not to laugh.

Delegates, audience, not to laugh too much, right?

So today, Karen, I want to talk about transfusion medicine.

And obviously this is a big topic and we could talk about it for a very

long time. Anecdotally, I actually recently had to give a one hour webinar on transfusion medicine.

I tried to translate a six hour a day of lectures into one hour and it was like, what do you

talk about? So I've tried to pick out some of the major points or themes to focus on and we'll see how we get on.

What I wanted to do was to start by discussing a little bit about pet blood banks in general and

obviously our transfusion service here. And then we'll move on and talk a little bit more about the kind of clinical medicine aspects.

So I guess we're better to start than to ask if you could please essentially sum up for us what we mean by transfusion medicine.

Okay. Transfusion medicine is the branch of medicine looking at transfusing any blood products basically.

And when we think of blood products, probably the first thing that pops into everyone's mind is

whole blood but actually we often break down our whole blood into lots of different products

there's loads of products available and so it's a branch looking at all of those different things

okay so basically the giving of blood products yeah deciding, but it's deciding when to give, what to give, and how to actually give it, I guess.

Everything around it.

Yes.

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