Veena Bhaskar S Gowda
Kamineni Institute of Medical Sciences, India
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Surgery Curr Res
Laboratory results play a very important role in patient care and about 70% of the clinician decisions for treatment are dependent on laboratory evaluation. Errors can occur at any phase of investigation and are classified as pre-analytical, analytical and post-analytical. Pre-analytical errors account for 75% of all the laboratory testing errors and could occur during patient preparation, specimen collection, handling/transportation, processing, storage, physiological influences and/or interference factors. Since blood collection is the first step, any error in this step will jeopardize the test results no matter how accurately the tests are analyzed. Since most of the pre-analytical errors are due to human interference, they can be avoided with proper education and training. Nurses along with others involved in health care including doctors, phlebotomists, laboratory personnel and transport service play a significant role in occurrence of pre-analytical errors. Since errors can occur during sample collection in the ward for inpatient samples and 60% of pre-analytical errors are attributed to insufficient specimen quality or quantity, nurses should be aware of the importance of pre-analytical errors and make all efforts to reduce the same. Nurses should have a good knowledge about the importance of proper collection of samples and their effect on patient results which in turn might affect treatment and care as rightly said a bad sample is worse than no sample.
Email: veebhas@hotmail.com
