Sorry Louise, as a new starter in my current Trust I’m no fully aware of our protocol but I’d guess all labs will do something slightly different, even different disciplines (biochem, haem) within the same Trust from previous experience, but with more labs processing them than not, certainly for routine tests.

 

Also with hospital patient information systems some receive data on the basis of the ‘hospital number’ and names only and don’t require or even display a requesting location. Therefore requestors don’t have the need to state a location as they can have access the results regardless (and as for paper reports chasing patients round a hospital days later, that’s a whole other debate. Printing hard copy reports for Unknown locations just serves as a means of auditing on a monthly basis – by height or weight of the pile!)

 

The same issue applies to accurate patient identifiers, see http://www.npsa.nhs.uk/corporate/news/nhsnumber (and I KNOW that NOT every person in the country has an NHS number but 99.x% probably do and there are ways to overcome the small minority).

 

I think it’s time we as the laboratory community adopted a more robust stand on these issues, but we have traditionally bent over backwards ‘because there is a real patient involved’, giving ourselves many logistical, administrative and clinical problems along the way.

 

The light at the end of the tunnel maybe that ward order comms from both hospitals and GPs should make things better by automatically providing (some) of this information.

 

I don’t known that pharmacy would release medicines to an unknown location or a dubiously identified patient. Plus who do you charge if you don’t know where to send the ‘bill’?

 

And on the subject of money, as a former colleague used to say ‘If you go to the bank and the cheques not signed, they don’t pay it!’

 

Have a good weekend all,

 

 

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