title: Reasons for exclusion of 6820 umbilical cord blood donations in a public cord blood bank.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  To provide information for umbilical cord blood (UCB) banks to adopt optimal collection strategies and to make UCB banks operate efficiently, we investigated the reasons for exclusion of UCB units in a 3-year recruitment period.
  
  
  METHODS
  We analyzed records of the reasons for exclusion of the potential UCB donation from 2004 to 2006 in the Tzu-Chi Cord Blood Bank and compared the results over 3 years. We grouped these reasons for exclusion into five phases, before collection, during delivery, before processing, during processing, and after freezing according to the time sequence and analyzed the reasons at each phase.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Between 2004 and 2006, there were 10,685 deliveries with the intention of UCB donation. In total, 41.2% of the UCB units were considered eligible for transplantation. The exclusion rates were 93.1, 48.4, and 54.1% in 2004, 2005, and 2006, respectively. We excluded 612 donations from women before their child birth, 133 UCB units during delivery, 80 units before processing, 5010 units during processing, and 421 units after freezing. There were 24 UCB units with unknown reasons of ineligibility. Low UCB weight and low cell count were the first two leading causes of exclusion (48.6 and 30.9%). The prevalence of artificial errors, holiday or transportation problem, low weight, and infant problems decreased year after year.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The exclusion rate was high at the beginning of our study as in previous studies. Understanding the reasons for UCB exclusion may help to improve the efficiency of UCB banking programs in the future.
authors.affiliation: Department of Hematology and Oncology, Buddhist Tzu-Chi General Hospital, Hualien, Taiwan; Buddhist Tzu-Chi Stem Cells Center, Buddhist Tzu-Chi General Hospital, Hualien, Taiwan; Department of Medicine, College of Medicine, Tzu-Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Tso-Fu
authors.initials: TF
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Shu-Hui
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Wen
authors.forename: Kuo-Liang
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Shang-Hsien
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Yun-Fan
authors.initials: YF
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Chu-Yu
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Yi-Feng
authors.initials: YF
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Shu-Huey
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D001771:Blood Banks / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D001782:Blood Donors / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D005260:Female; D005312:Fetal Blood; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007234:Infant, Premature / Q000097:blood; D008470:Meconium / Q000502:physiology; D018579:Patient Selection; D011247:Pregnancy; D011248:Pregnancy Complications / Q000097:blood / Q000453:epidemiology; D017150:Public Sector; D000094902:Blood Banking / Q000379:methods*