Lots of people come here to complain when things are inconvenient, but I want to share my experience as a healthcare professional. I work in Transfusion Medicine (blood bank and cellular therapy) and about 75% of my job is maintaining a constant awareness of local, state, federal, international and commercial regulations/accreditations, making sure we're compliant and responding to any changes or noncompliances. I sincerely hope this place gets an actual unannounced federal inspection, and what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall for that one. For a start, they don't follow cGDP (current good documentation practices). I saw several instances of red flag documentation practices. FDA (and all the other regulatory bodies) will love seeing that, but I suspect they're doing non-concurrent documentation, which, once again, is grounds for citation. cGDP is a core component of maintenance of manufacturing, and when that area has weaknesses, in my experience, you can be reasonably certain other areas will too. Again, I can say this from my own professional experience, both being an inspector and having my work units inspected about 100 times in the 12 years of my career.
For my personal experience and feelings about this center:
I found this center and their process to be, in a word, terrible. And that's saying something, I am about the most easy going person you can imagine. I legit pulled up this Yelp account that's YEARS old because I cannot believe how bad this was.
1. Completely arbitrary mileage/distance rules (the assistant told me that each center (despite being in the Twin Cities metro) are allowed to decide on the range they allow donors to come from. 50 miles? 75 miles? Good luck finding out which!
2. Wait time. I have spent a total of 4 hours waiting in this place's lobby across 2 visits.
3. THEY OUT TRANS PEOPLE because their policies are not built to handle trans people. It's 2023, come on. Also, their trans criteria are massively outdated (kept asking about "THE SURGERY" and saying FULLY TRANSITIONED). This is not the appropriate language to use, and it's not unreasonable to expect better from a company that works with the public. I work in blood banking (far more highly regulated) and it's not like that anywhere else, for any other blood or cell therapy product.
4. Completely nonsense deferral policies. Back surgery to remove a disk? Perfectly fine! Back surgery to remove a disk and a 1 inch piece of bone? DEFFERED! They also can't tell you an actual reason, just keep saying 'it's policy'. And riddle me this, their deferral policy for a colonoscopy is 6 MONTHS, apparently because of infection risks. Dude, if you're going to get an infection from a colonoscopy, it's not going to take 6 months to show up. A perforation will make itself known in hours, not months. I'd be very interested in knowing what published evidence they have for a 6 months deferral due to colonoscopy-related infection.
5. Scheduling. Apparently the calendar software they use must be a wreck because they scheduled me for a totally different WEEK, then verbally confirmed with me the correct date. Well, it was wrong. Normally this wouldn't bother me, because they fixed it, but it was the SECOND instance of this happening (mind you, I've been there TWICE, and both times it happened). Oh, and if you're calling the center? Expect to call AT least 3 times before anyone answers.
Avoid Telecris and DEFINITELY avoid this center. The employees are really friendly and it's a nice place, but they have some VERY big issues that need to be addressed. read more