Had my in person pre-op on Wednesday where main item on the agenda was blood tests. I was given a whole heap of info to inform consent (pain relief, anaesthesia, DVT etc) and thought I’d have a laugh and send my friend a photo of the Blood Transfusion leaflet, only to get a reply that I’d made their day, it’s their leaflet and glad to actually see it being used in the wild! All of which led to another conversation about why I needed two separate sets of blood tests, as mentioned in the last blog.
It turns out it’s all to do with having a control sample for when they type your blood in case you need a transfusion. Samples are meant to be taken (and labelled) by two different people so that when they receive them, if they come up with two different answers, they know there’s a problem.
Some hospitals apparently claim they only have one person who can take transfusion samples (so far as I could tell, it was just the same as any other vial of blood being taken for a blood test) so the rules were changed to state the samples had to come from two separate phlebotomy episodes, meaning two separate episodes of identifying the patient and doing the venepuncture.
Somehow, this has been translated across the country as taking two separate samples, 30 minutes apart. In reality, there is absolutely no need for two separate appointments: both samples could be taken at the same time - just identified and labelled separately - but here we are. Mad how some protocols evolve, isn’t it? Still, if I was faced with having to tell someone or their family that they’d been given the wrong blood type (with all the issues that entails), I’d take it pretty seriously so better safe than sorry.
Anyway, after that little detour down to the land of blood typing, everything else went pretty smoothly and I headed back home to carry on finishing up my work projects and start getting things ready for a crazy pre-op weekend of people and activities before the big day.
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