Caritas Medical Centre announces incident of delayed blood specimen handling
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The spokesman for Caritas Medical Centre (CMC) made the following announcement today (July 12) regarding an incident of delayed blood specimen handling:
The laboratory department of CMC yesterday (July 11) reported that a batch of 27 tubes of blood specimens taken for complete blood count (CBC) for 27 Specialist Out-patient Clinic (SOPC) patients was still kept in the delivery trolley located inside the laboratory and had not been sent out for laboratory testing. The batch of specimens was collected on Monday morning (July 10) and should have been sent out to the laboratory for assay on the same day of collection.
Since all the blood specimens were no longer suitable for conducting laboratory analysis, the hospital management has started to contact the 27 patients concerned to arrange for blood collection again, explain the incident and also extend apologies.
The CBC test is usually arranged for regular monitoring of a patient's clinical condition in an SOPC. The delay in testing for a few days usually would not have any impact on patients who require urgent treatment. The incident has been reported to the Hospital Authority Head Office via the Advance Incident Reporting System.
The hospital has apologised for the inconvenience caused to the affected patients. Prevailing procedures will be reviewed for root cause analysis to identify appropriate improvement measures.
Ends/Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Issued at HKT 17:40
Issued at HKT 17:40
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