Whoopsy

Just to keep the “Evil Labtests” story ticking over (before the next big story where the HDC tells you it has received 20,000 complaints about labtests – all from a little old lady in Palmerston North), the Herald tells us about a wrong result. And how it made a patient worried. Not dead, just worried.

And Labtests admitted it. Ooooo.

Slow news day.

While I feel sorry for the lady who was put through all that unnecessary worry, the reality is that this sort of thing occasionally happens in busy labs. Someone does not start a flush cycle or forgets to recalibrate after it. Or the machine is having a bad hair day or is simply broken. These things happen. The important thing is that the error was picked up before anyone got hurt. And the important thing for Labtests is to go back into its processes to see how this can be avoided in the future. I have had wacky results from every lab I have ever sent blood tests to. If you get an unexplained result, you simply repeat it.

It is annoying.

But it is hardly news.

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