PATIENT PREP
Save Time by Moving Blood Draws to Holding
Patients that can't undergo our pre-screening process in advance of their procedures must have their blood drawn on the day of surgery. And in some cases, a surgeon may request an additional day-of-surgery lab draw based on pre-screening results.

Performing day-of-surgery blood draws often requires the patient to move from check-in to a registration waiting room, on to registration, then to a surgery waiting room, to an outpatient lab, back to a surgery waiting room, and — finally — to pre-op holding. In addition to shuttling the patient back and forth, this process entails a lot of communication and multiple hand-offs. As you can imagine, there are a lot of potential failure points. Instead, have a nurse, clerk or tech simply move the patient directly from registration to holding for the patient blood draw. Taking these 2 steps eliminates the need to return patients to the surgery waiting room and the outpatient lab after they've registered. And whenever possible, have the nurse perform the draw when starting the patient's IV. In addition to being more efficient, this results in just 1 needlestick, which should certainly help increase patient satisfaction and comfort.

Chris Medlin, RN, CCRN
Capital Region Medical Center
Jefferson City, Mo.
[email protected]