Watch out for THIS problem!!

[star0210]

Here's my dumb phlebotomist story of the week. For places where there are no LabCorp's nearby...in this case it was Montana...we will send a customer the tubes they need for the tests they want along with a general requisition for phlebotomy and instructions. The form has a list of tubes with spaces next to them that we write in the number of tubes that need to be drawn. The customer is on their own to find a place to draw the blood for them. The customer then overnights the blood back to us and we drop it off at LC.
In this particular case the customer placed two orders at separate times. So she was sent two "kits" by two different people in my office. One girl added in parenthesis next to the SST tubes on the form (needs centrifuging). The other girl's form didn't have that added note. Now anybody in phlebotomy knows SST's (serum separator tubes) HAVE to be centrifuged.
They are completely useless if not spun down and separated..and it has to be done within a certain amount of time...like minutes, not days.
So we received the overnight package yesterday with the blood. She took both kits at the same time to whatever lab she used. There were 5 tubes in all. 2 were spun down and 3 weren't. The 3 unspun tubes are trash but I think the lab will be able to run all the tests from the two tubes.
But all because one paper didnt specify with a "dummy" note that the SST's need centrifuging they didn't centrifuge.
What I did on our end was make sure everybody begins using the same form and had the "dummy" note added to all of them.
It's just such a no brainer though....that's like phlebotomy 101.

 

[Spiky Bugger]

Here's my dumb phlebotomist story of the week. For places where there are no LabCorp's nearby...in this case it was Montana...we will send a customer the tubes they need for the tests they want along with a general requisition for phlebotomy and instructions. The form has a list of tubes with spaces next to them that we write in the number of tubes that need to be drawn. The customer is on their own to find a place to draw the blood for them. The customer then overnights the blood back to us and we drop it off at LC.
In this particular case the customer placed two orders at separate times. So she was sent two "kits" by two different people in my office. One girl added in parenthesis next to the SST tubes on the form (needs centrifuging). The other girl's form didn't have that added note. Now anybody in phlebotomy knows SST's (serum separator tubes) HAVE to be centrifuged.
They are completely useless if not spun down and separated..and it has to be done within a certain amount of time...like minutes, not days.
So we received the overnight package yesterday with the blood. She took both kits at the same time to whatever lab she used. There were 5 tubes in all. 2 were spun down and 3 weren't. The 3 unspun tubes are trash but I think the lab will be able to run all the tests from the two tubes.
But all because one paper didnt specify with a "dummy" note that the SST's need centrifuging they didn't centrifuge.
What I did on our end was make sure everybody begins using the same form and had the "dummy" note added to all of them.
It's just such a no brainer though....that's like phlebotomy 101.

Well, shit, too.

Here's one of mine: I had two doctors writing lab orders for different reasons. Both had ordered CMPs and CBCs and LIPIDS and I forget what else. I wasn't watching and next thing I know I've got about twenty tubes on the table...full of my (already anemic) blood. I asked the reasonable question and the genius told me that he was drawing everything twice because there were two orders. I asked if he thought that was the best way to do that, or if maybe sending the results from ONE test to TWO doctors might be an even better way. He said he hadn't thought of that.