Reading the superlative Jobbing Doctor's recent experience with a private contractor who refused to do the job they are being paid to reminded me of a current bête noire of mine at work: the labs.
I mean, all they have to do is take the bottles of blood I send them and put them into a machine, right? In exchange for this, they can make me do whatever they want. I'm obliged to include something like seventeen different patient identifiers on bottles for cross-match, for instance, and given that I'm working with newborn babies at the moment the bottles are about the diameter of a biro, and not nearly as long. In addition, they're frequently covered in blood, and to cap it all off the affluent population of the area I'm working in love double-barreled names.
I do understand the need to avoid putting results on the system under the wrong name, incidentally - but we have to include little sticky-labels in the "BIOHAZARD" plastic bags the bottles go in which have all this information on. Again.
All this microscopic calligraphy would be fine if the labs actually ran the samples - but no. One bottle I sent off recently came back - on the computer - with the comment "patient details illegible. Please ask the patient to state their name and date of birth." My immediate reaction, bizarrely, was to think:
But how would that help you read it?
followed closely by:
Can you still run the sample in two or three years when the baby has learned to speak?
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