In part 5 of our interview with Dr Richard Jones, we look int the advantages of printed wristbands and labels over hand written ones.
One of the big risks in diagnostic testing is that we don’t get the right information on the right tube about the patient. It’s well know that if tubes are collected from patients and hand written later or pre-written that there’s a big chance of a mix up between the patient samples. Therefore the safest way of collecting the specimen is to print the label at the time the sample’s collected and to fix it to the tube at the patient bedside so there is no chance of mismatching the label and the tube. This means a change of the workflow at the bedside but with modern portable printers and systems it’s perfectly feasible to equip people with that sort of equipment, again we see that sort of stuff in supermarkets, it’s just adopting the same technology into this new environment.
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