A Case from a Government Hospital Venipuncture Clinic (What was the problem? Who was responsible?)
VIROJ WIWANITKIT, M.D.*
Affiliation : * Department of Laboratory Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Clulalongkorn University, Bangkok I 0330. Thailand.
The venipuncture clinic at a large govern- ment referral hospital is a busy and impersonnel place. It is difficult to satisfy every patient who comes there. One afternoon, a middle aged female came for pre-admission screening blood collection. While the procedure was performed, she noted a sharp pain in her arm. She asked when she could receive her blood test results which she had been asked to present when she returns for admission. There was no answer and she went out and waited. She noticed that some of the clinic personnel read newspapers and some sang a song moving rhyth- mically to the sound. Three hours passed and she decided to come back and asked for her results. She was referred to an other room and, after some addi- tional waiting, was told that her sample and the results had vanished and that this type of situation occurred not infrequently. There was no other explanation nor any suggestion on what she should do next. She was later admitted for breast surgery without the usual pre-admission screening and was scolded by the surgical resident for not having had the tests performed. Her father was sufficiently upset by this to write a letter to the hospital director. What was the problem? None of the medical per- sonnel at the venipuncture clinic could provide an adequate explanation and nobody accepted or was assigned responsibility for this event. It was never established whether the error was one of the staff or the patient herself.
Keywords : Ethics, Procedure, Infom1ed Consent
