Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality

The ASCLS Patient Safety Committee has a subcommittee that is working to create and finalize a new product titled "Improving Patient Safety - Toolkit for Clinical Laboratories."

The purpose of the toolkit is to provide laboratorians resources for examining processes, identifying areas for improvement, creating work teams, choosing effective quality tools and implementing successful patient safety-based initiatives. This toolkit provides guidance on how the laboratory can be an advocate for and be a vital healthcare partner in evaluating and improving the continuum of care.

The toolkit will contain templates for laboratories to develop and track Patient Safety Quality Indicators (PSQI). The intent of the (PSQI) is that they can be used by laboratories to assess their performance against each other. Therefore, it is important that the definitions are clearly stated and reflect current practice so the indicators can be accurately counted and appropriately compared.

Here are the questions for all members who actively work in clinical laboratories:

1. When a sample is rejected, do you consider it as 1 sample rejected or the total number of tests that are unable to be performed? For example, if you reject a sample for a BMP, is that a rejection for each test (potentially 8) or simply 1 sample rejected?
2. Would there be merit in tracking the total number of tests rejected over the number of samples rejected?
3. Do you track specimen rejections for non-blood samples (e.g.body fluids, microbiology non-blood cultures)?

To respond, please send your input to:   Marie Wood mewood@udel.edu


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Lezlee Koch for Marie Wood, ASCLS Patient Safety
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