Your doctors and nurses may be better trained, more compliant with procedures and less stressed than ours or maybe you are more trusting. I don’t think this
is an exact science so anything which helps motivate staff to do things in a safer way should help.
We get all sorts of stupidity when they are using hand written requests. Samples from multiple patients in the same bag, Pre labelled tubes filled with a different
patient’s blood, un-labelled tubes sitting around waiting to be labelled, multiple patients with the same age specific clinical details. Almost anything seems possible so it seems logical to ask for the same points of reference between tube and form as we
want between the request form and IT systems. Asking for a number which is on the ID band also seems likely to increase the chance that the details written on tubes come off the ID band.
We do trust the barcoded request number on the label which ICE prints but those are
supposed to be printed beside the patient and at the time of blood drawing so there is less opportunity for a mixup.
Richard
From: Jonathan Kay [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 08 May 2015 17:15
To: Richard Stott
Cc: Jonathan Kay; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Specimen acceptance policy
Why do you need this information on the specimen?
Is this a temporary approach until the specimens arrive uniquely barcoded? Once that is achieved you can find all the other information by looking at the associated computerised request that has arrived in the LIS…
(Confirming it’s the right patient as the specimen is collected is a good idea… is that where the stringency for what is on the label comes from, rather than anything that happens
in the laboratory.)
Jonathan
On 8 May 2015, at 16:57, Richard Stott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Sorry Wayne but I agree with your inspector.
You need a unique identifier if at all possible as otherwise you could have the wrong David Jones or John Smith. Near Doncaster we have a GP practice with
two patients with identical names and DOB living on the same street so something else is needed to make the ID on your request unique.
I do agree with Jonathan that you cannot rely only on one information source. That is why, even though our ICE system uses scanned barcodes, our phlebotomists
confirm details which they should know with the patient. We have had examples where the wireless network drops out and patient details don’t change when the code is scanned as well as patients wearing the wrong ID band. All neatly recorded on DATIX and reported
to NRLS but that does not stop the errors whereas a robust labelling policy might if properly enforced.
Regards
Richard Stott
Doncaster & Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
From: Clinical
biochemistry discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan
Kay
Sent: 08 May 2015 16:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Specimen acceptance policy
Is that regardless of whether they are human-read and transcribed or machine-read eg by barcode? If so then it can't optimise the number or costs of of false-positives and false-negatives correctly.
There's a related but different point about multiple points of ID: if they come from the same source and a common error is selecting the wrong source then the number of points becomes irrelevant.
Jonathan
On 8 May 2015, at 16:03, Bradbury Wayne (RNL) North Cumbria University Hospitals <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
One of the findings at our recent UKAS inspection was a requirement for three pieces of ‘unique identifiers’ on all samples.
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