Clinical Phlebotomy - Coursework Example

Collected blood is then mixed by inverting it several times and correctly labeled with the patient details. The patient is given small gauze to hold over the puncture site to arrest bleeding. Great care should be exercised when handling blood bank samples since errors in blood banking lead to undesirable transfusion reactions that can be life threatening. There is also a high likely hood of clerical errors occurring since it is a multistep process. This is because blood culture samples are time sensitive due to the nature of the infection.

Specimens can only be of diagnostic value (yield positive results) when collected at a time the pathogens are in the peripheral circulation. It is at this time when the samples are ordered as STAT. Contaminated blood culture is when a positive blood culture is due to normal skin flora and not the causative pathogen. Contamination occurs during sample collection and inoculation of the sample in the culture media. This, process is to be done aseptically failure to which contamination occurs. In therapeutic drug monitoring a peak is the time point when the drug concentration is high, and it is the immediately after a dose has been administered.

A trough on the other hand, is when the drug concentration is low at the end of the dosage interval. Blood samples for TDM are commonly collected during the trough phase. A fasting sample for OGTT must be collected to enable correct of the result. The test is done to confirm diabetes mellitus by determining patient’s tolerability to a standard dose of glucose given during the test. Non-fasting samples are likely to give false positive results due to pre-existing high blood glucose concentration following a meal( Medtexx Medical Corporation, 2007).

I would flash the IV line on one of the arms with heparin solution to avoid thrombosis. I would then discard the first