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:
0:00Intro
0:56What Red Tops do
1:21Why Red Tops yield serum instead of plasma
1:52What is fibrin?
3:04How centrifugation yields serum
3:28Other tubes the yield serum
3:43Why you must wait 2030 minutes for clotting to take place
4:51What happens when red tops are spun too soon
5:10Why red tops have a clot activator and not a clot accelerator
5:46Why you shouldn't spin tubes twice
7:12Why you can't refrigerate a red top before centrifugation
7:50What if the red top doesn't have a gel?
8:00Are red tops the most important tube?
8:28Why red tops are no longer the first tube in the order of draw
9:23Why a change in the order of draw was necessary when red tops started being made of plastic.
10:51If you increase the RPM, why can't you speed up the centrifugation?
11: 53What is the proper RCF (gforce) 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/TTPiftub...

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