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Project Description

The clinical laboratory plays a vital role in public health, disease control, and surveillance in diagnosing and caring for individual patients. As laboratory data influences 70% of medical diagnosis, incorrect or incomplete data provided to the laboratory could significantly affect the success and cost of overall treatment.

Laboratory request forms serve as a mode of communication between the requesting clinician or doctor and the laboratory consultants. These forms usually go along with the patient’s specimen to the laboratory to arrive at a proper diagnosis; the requesting clinician must choose the specific test and appropriately fill out the form. If there is any flaw in completely filling of all the required information, there are various consequences including wrong patient identification, confusions and delay in the interpretation of the results.

This becomes very evident and important, especially in large hospitals where thousands of patients are seen daily. Along with this, information on demographics like age, gender, specimen types also are important. In many cases, the clinical diagnosis and drug regime also become necessary for co-relating the results, thus avoiding repeat testing.

If laboratory request forms for investigations are incomplete and inadequately filled. This will influence the quality of service of the laboratory, as delays may arise while trying to obtain such missing information, inappropriate tests may be performed on the patients or there may be difficulty in proper interpretation of obtained results. All these may affect clinical decisions, patient management and quality of the laboratory.

As per the local accreditation regulation norms, the local regulatory body emphasize establishing the quality indicators (QIs) to monitor and evaluate performance throughout the critical aspects of pre-examination, examination and post-examination processes. According to the regulatory requirements, giving importance to the critical parameters and critical samples, their results also have to be informed on time.

There is also a need to continuously communicate with the clinicians on the importance of completing the LRFs for investigations. For accreditation and standard quality care, there is a need for such information to be available. Therefore, all attempts must be undertaken to reduce laboratory errors, including correct, accurate and complete filing of laboratory request forms by the clinician to ensure quality and efficient patient care.

This can be achieved through continuous medical education programs where the importance of each quality indicator is further emphasized. We have noted that some clinicians do not completely fill in the laboratory request forms. This study is therefore focused to ascertain the situation as it is and determine the type and frequency of missing of the relevant data in laboratory request forms in our hospital laboratory.