Lab Draw Guides - Children's hospitals questions

We have the minimum collection volumes in the lab test directory on the Intranet.  But mostly the nurses call our client services department to ask how many tubes to draw.

We also have a full lab test directory with that info. And unfortunately do not have a client services department. 

We stopped the hand held cards years ago. It was far too difficult to maintain and keep "up to date" with the changes that do occur. We use an online test catalog that can be easily accessed. Of course, the calls to main laboratory client services do still happen. I have seen our client service team walk the caller through how to look up a test. Education in real time!

Hi Danyel! First I have to disclose that I am no longer a POC Manager, and in my new role with Accumen may be considered a "vendor" now. With that said, putting on my previous hat of Manager of Pre-Analytic and POCT for a large Children's Hospital that went through a Beaker implementation in the past year...we had some major hurdles to overcome with this as well. As we all know from working in a Children's hospital - there is the per-test minimum amount that we can program into Beaker - say 0.3 mL per test, and then there is the unwritten minimums that our nurses memorize who regularly work with micro-preemies in the NICU that they learn from experience. For example, in Beaker a Sodium test may say that it requires a minimum of 0.3 mL, and a Bilirubin test may also say that it requires a minimum of 0.3 mL, so when both are ordered it appears in Beaker that the lab needs 0.6 mL to perform both tests. Yet, we know that in truth, both tests could be performed on 0.3 mL.  We were challenged to articulate that in Beaker. There were previous versions of guides and such, that we had to eradicate from their policies, but those kinds of things hang on to life in someone's pocket forever and get passed down with training. We too had client services fielding many calls on that subject during business hours, and our poor night shift phlebs getting hammered with calls before AM draws too. I suppose at the end of the day we still wanted the total of all minimum volumes where possible - so the 0.6 mL in the example above was what we stated as our preferred, but then had a policy around performing as much as we could with what we had, and calling when we were not able to perform everything that was ordered. It happened often, and our QNS rates were always much higher than I had ever seen in working within mostly adult hospitals prior to that.