The Importance of the Indirect Antiglobulin Test

When we were all doing tube tests, it was very common to do an indirect antiglobulin test as part of every RH typing. That change was in the 80s when we got the monoclonal reagents which were very good at detecting weaker than normal D antigens on red cells at the initial spin. So a lot of us dropped the indirect antglobulin test on patient samples at that time. But some of us have dropped it also because then the DAT on the patient's own cells could interfere with the test and make it confusing to interpret. so there's no harm in treating a patient as RH negative.