This is my first pitting, I hope I don’t blow it.
I work in a hospital laboratory, processing blood, fluid, tissue and other patient samples from 11pm to 7am. We handle a lot of STAT and emergency specimens, as well as process samples from all kinds of patients.
I won’t get too much into the smaller, more petty examples of glaring stupidity and absolute incompetence of some of the people working here, because I’ve made my fair share of human error mistakes. However, some things are just plain unacceptable.
Examples:
Sending down a patient’s arterial blood gas specimen with the sharp still intact is unacceptable. Then, proceeding to get mad at the laboratory staff for insisting that the person responsible come and remove the sharp, and for explaining to said responsible person that the sample is unsuitable for analysis because it has been contaminated by air since the sharp was left intact, allowing air to infiltrate the sample, is also unacceptable. As is cursing out the laboratory staff because of this, and telling us we do not care about our patients.
Sending me a broken tube is stupid, and unacceptable. If the tube had broken in transit, this is not the sender’s fault. However, if the tube was broken before sending it, then the sender is a grade A fucking moron. And in this instance it was **clearly ** broken beforehand. How can I tell, you ask? Because the nurse that sent it had fixed clear scotch fucking tape all over the outside of the broken tube. The tube was completely cracked, halfway down the tube. Instead of pouring over the blood into a fresh, nonbroken tube, she performs some MacGuyver fucking magic on it with the scotch fucking tape. Later I was to learn that she had called about it and been informed that the blood was unnecessary, as it was extra anyway, and that she had been told not to send it. But she sent it anyway, in a broken tube. If that blood had leaked out enough, the entire tubing system in the hospital would have had to have been shut down and sterilized, ruining an entire day’s workload. This is beyond stupid, and beyond unacceptable.
But tonight, what made me extremely angry is this particular situation.
I received a laboratory sample from the Neonatal Transition Nursery. These are sick babies, newborns. They are extremely fragile. Often they have very low birth weight, and have restrictions on how much blood can be drawn from them.
The sample was completely unlabeled. It is our laboratory policy not to accept any unlabeled specimens except in situations of life and death, such as a patient coding, or in situations where there is no possible alternative to obtain a new sample, in the case of certain drug tests, or inobtainable specimens like newborns or other patients who have restrictions on the amount of blood able to be drawn.
I telephone the nurse on the floor and explain the situation. I could hear her telling the nurse that drew the sample, who sounded as if she were standing beside the one on the phone, what I had said.
She laughed.
She fucking laughed, like it was a huge joke. Like an ‘oops, my bad’ type of joke.
I was not amused, and I really got angry with the nonchalance that she extended to the issue. If it was your baby in the hospital, wouldn’t you want the nurse to actually care whether or not she properly labeled your baby’s sample? She simply shrugged it off.
I wish I had not been so angry that I forgot to ask her name, or I would have requested a meeting with the Administrative Nurse Coordinator to discuss the impropriety of the behavior displayed.
This behavior is all too frequent on the part of the nurses, and I find it completely unprofessional and unacceptable. All too often when we call to inform them of a problem with their sample, they’ll nonchalantly reply, ‘Oh, I can come fill out a form, right?’ as though they are somehow excused from doing their job properly because if they make a mistake they can simply sign an accountability form and make it okay.
Oftentimes we will receive mislabeled samples, and call the nurses to make them aware of the problem. Sometimes they will make our lives miserable and insist that we take the samples, even though they have been mislabeled or otherwise mishandled. How dare we make sure the patients are safe! How dare we verify the identity of a patient before performing testing that is vital to a patient’s health? I explain to them that I could lose my job if I take them at their word and accept something and it’s wrong. If I result a sample and those results go out, and it’s from the wrong patient, and that result is the basis for a dose of medication, and that medication is given in error, the patient can become ill or die. And then it is my liability because I accepted your word when hospital policy clearly dictates that I am not supposed to do so.
It’s not personal, as you seem to think it is. I am not giving you a hard time simply to piss you off. It’s my job.
And when you think it’s cute or funny that you forgot to do something as basic as put a label for identification on a newborn baby’s blood sample, I have a few choice words for you.
Maybe I expected something like, 'I’m sorry, I’m the person responsible for that sample and I forgot to label it. Is it possible to come and sign an accountability form?" Instead of, “Haha, oops. I can come sign a form, right?”
You’re busy, and you do a job that I could never do, I’ll give you that. I admire and respect you for it. Nurses are often underpaid and underappreciated, and their job is a hard one. We all make mistakes, especially working long hours under stress. But, with that job comes certain expectations, and laughing about something that serious makes me lose all respect I had for you.
Not to mention you cheapen and disgrace the reputation of every nurse before and after you that does good work, cares about his or her mistakes, and actually acts like they care about their patients. This pitting is mostly for their sake, and the sake of that little newborn baby who didn’t do a damn thing to you.
