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I have a good friend who works as a lab tech in a major clinic around here. she has been talking to me about some of the samples she receives being marked incorrectly, most times majorly.Such errors continually occur such as incorrect names, birth-dates and alike. she has been taking a lot of flak for telling the nurse aids that they need to correctly mark samples as a matter of legal protection for the clinic.(she is required to void any sample that is incorrectly marked). I am trained in environmental science so this seems oddly incompetent that basic descriptors are not getting on the samples.

all I want is perspective on if I am crazy in telling her tonight it needs to be brought to the attention of whatever high level supervisor in order to get these people correctly marking these samples.

You are 100% correct. And not for the reasons of keeping the administration from threat of lawsuit, but because someone could be actually hurt by mislabeling.

But she should present it to the administration as something that guards their wallets.

Oh, and since she's a whistleblower, expect her to be ridiculed and possibly forced to look for work elsewhere.

Or tell her to send this to the local news station and have them snoop around for her. Nothing will light a fire on everyone's collective ass than the media reporting how badly things are.

A good practice for her (that her supervisor already should have had in place) is a system for recording incorrectly marked samples. From this it is a simple matter of saying "Hey we have 10% error rate in this, this is unnacceptably high right?"

As for the nurse's aids giving her flak about the samples being incorrectly marked, screw them it's there fault in the first place. Not much you can do about that other than sending their supervisors this error rate number along with an explanation of how this costs your organization a lot more money. Obviously that number should come from the lab techs supervisor, not directly from the lab tech.

so I talked to her some more, she has done all this, we are talking like 65% error rate. also while her lab head is pissed as shit, the head of the nurses personally came and told her to suck a dick. this is basically sounding like we are one bad pull from a full blown lawsuit

Well this really is in her supervisor's hands, but in his shoes...I would be appalled if the head nurse responded to me like that in this situation. I would give her one more chance to fix it and make it clear that i am going over her head.

65% error rate is unnaceptable. Even in Tijuana.

Ask them what they would find to be an acceptable level of accuracy and what would be less than acceptable. Then, when they give a number in the high 80-90% range, tell them, "Well, right now we are at 35% accuracy!!!"

Watch their heads explode. Stay away from the 65% number even if it denotes failure rates.

in my field 10% is completely unacceptable, I am appalled by the fact that these fuckers are getting basics wrong. its not high level stuff like wrong test ordered, peoples names ages etc wrong. this shouldnt be happening at all!

Are the nurses members of a union or something? That's the only thing I can think of for the head nurse to be throwing her weight around like that, and the only thing that might make fixing things such a problem.

I apologize for bringing it to you guys, but I have been hearing about it for a few weeks. I want to help her so bad but there is nothing I can do that wont see her caught in the crossfire.

@drifter, I dont know, I will ask her if we talk tonight.

so yeah, talked to her last night, it made it to their clinic administrator. she was not happy at all. she has emailed all the supervisors and told them of the consequences of not doing so, up to termination. the problem is fixed for now, but I guess the aids/nurses are taking it personal! I just laughed as we talked about their current attitude.

Bones said:

so yeah, talked to her last night, it made it to their clinic administrator. she was not happy at all. she has emailed all the supervisors and told them of the consequences of not doing so, up to termination. the problem is fixed for now, but I guess the aids/nurses are taking it personal! I just laughed as we talked about their current attitude.

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Glad it work out. 65% failure rate? at a hospital? that is disastrous.