North Lantau Hospital announces specimen handling incident
**********************************************************
The spokesman for North Lantau Hospital (NLTH) made the following announcement today (December 14) regarding an incident of delayed specimen handling:
Staff of the NLTH Community Health Centre this morning reported that a batch of deep throat saliva specimens collected from 11 patients was still kept in the collection box and had not been sent out to the relevant laboratory for testing on Saturday morning (December 12) as scheduled. The batch of specimens should have been sent out for testing on the day of collection.
Since all of the deep throat saliva specimens were no longer suitable for conducting laboratory analysis, staff have contacted the patients concerned to explain the incident, offer apologies and arrange for them to return to the clinic for deep throat saliva sample collection as soon as possible.
The incident has been reported to the Hospital Authority Head Office via the Advance Incident Reporting System. The hospital apologises for the inconvenience caused to the affected patients, and will continue to closely communicate with the patients to provide the necessary assistance. Prevailing procedures will be reviewed for root cause analysis to identify appropriate improvement measures.
Ends/Monday, December 14, 2020
Issued at HKT 20:30
Issued at HKT 20:30
NNNN