You are a phlebotomist for a community laboratory, and you report for work on an extremely busy day. You travel daily from the lab where you work to the hospital to draw blood and then back to the lab. You have finished drawing blood at the hospital and are on your way back to the lab when you get a cell phone call that the hospital needs a complete blood count and electrolytes drawn STAT for a patient who has just come into the ER. Would you turn around and go back to the ER or drop off your current blood samples and then go back to the ER? Explain your answer. What does this question have to do with preventing medical malpractice lawsuits?

Respuesta :

Answer: I will drop off the first sample at the lab before going to the ER.

Explanation: The longer the sample stays the more it can be denatured. There might be changes in temperature and coagulation which can alter test results. The best thing is I'll do is to ensure that it is preserved since I have taken it already. Besides there should always be someone on standby at the ER to draw blood in case there is an emergency.

If there are alterations and the blood yields a different result, the patient can sue if it is discovered that it didn't get to the lab as fast as it should. I will also have this at the back of my mind. So I will drip the first sample first before returning to the ER.

Answer:

As the patient who is in the emergency room needs to receive care urgently, the ideal would be for the phlebotomist to return to the emergency room and help with the care.

Explanation:

In the situation shown in the question above, the phlebotomist has a difficult decision to make. If she returns to the emergency room, the blood samples he has already collected and which need to be stored in ideal conditions, may deteriorate and it will not be possible to analyze them. All the work of collecting them will have to be done again, which will have a certain cost.

However, the phlebotomist was called to the emergency room to see a patient who has just arrived. When a patient is taken to the emergency room, it means that he needs urgent care because he is at serious risk of life. For this reason, it would be ethical if the phlebotomist returned to the emergency room, as his presence may be essential for the patient's recovery.