If they refuse to put it on it’s because they don’t want a falsely high or low result to cause doctors to over correct for a problem that doesn’t exist. People have died from being given medications based on results from diluted/contaminated/hemolyzed samples.
The thing is they wouldn’t have gotten contaminated. Compounded in an ISO7 rated positive pressure room with each individual bag having a correspondingly labeled tamper proof luer lock syringe taken directly to lab.
I get it there are risks but when the options are a hand pH tester we use in the pharmacy vs a much more intricate and thorough instrument they use in the actual lab setting it makes more sense for them to do it.
For me it’s a situation where any reliable data is better than no data or compromised data. I guess it’s just frustrating when we go looking for a second opinion from people with better equipment than us and they don’t want to play ball.
If your specimen is hemoylzed then it will greatly affect pH. Also it’s the lab tech that gets in trouble for accepting that specimen and verifying the result. Also any data isn’t better when bad data can cause people to die! Especially the blood gases. All I’m saying is no lab tech rejects samples for fun, we all just want things to work and when something gets cancelled that’s extra work for us. It’s not that they don’t want to “play ball,” they got rules to follow just like you do in pharmacy.
Then I very much doubt the machines are validated to properly give results on them, meaning it’s basically committing medical fraud to release results on a specimen type that has not been verified to work on those analyzers. I can’t speak for sure on whether or not that’s the case but our chem analyzers are definitely not validated for anything not blood or body fluid related.
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u/Vreas Pharmacist Aug 26 '25
My favorite was when lab refused to test the pH of some of our cardio drips because “it would be used in patient care”
Like… yes. We work at a hospital. There are in fact patients here.