bronxbomber

We have reported it repeatedly to the lab manager, risk management, HR, called the corporate compliance hotline, and even followed the chain of command to the CEO of the hospital. I really am at a loss that they allow these mistakes to happen. I think the problem is that our immediate supervisor knows nothing of blood bank, and she tries to cover the mistakes up to a point. I don't know if this is because she doesn't know the severity of the mistakes, or if she does it for personal reasons. The tech making all the mistakes always blames them on someone else or just flat out denies that it was her work. I don't know how she can miss an antibody, turn out the wrong results, and sign her panel and still blame it on someone else. She blamed the last incident on the evening shift tech. She tried to say she told him to double check her Ag typing for c which is total crap. Even if she had told him to check it she shouldn't have turned out a result she wasn't 100% sure of or ordered screened units from the ARC reference lab. We are not AABB accredited anymore. We dropped them about 2.5 years ago. As far as I know nothing has been reported to the FDA. I do know in the case of her handing out the wrong unit of blood the nurse caught it at the bedside, so risk management said it wasn't a big issue (did this twice). To make things worse she handed out an A unit to a B patient on one, and the other patient had a E, c, and K and she handed out units from an unscreened patient. It's looking like reporting them to CAP, joint commission, or the FDA is about my only option. I don't care what situation it puts me in since I believe I am putting patient's lives first. We all make mistakes, but for as long as I have been there she's the only tech that's made a non-clerical error. Everyone puts the wrong armband number in the computer or scans the wrong specimen in every once in a while, but she makes these clerical errors daily with the major errors on top of them.

First of all I am new here, and if this is in the wrong thread I am sorry. We are having repeated problems with a blood bank tech. She keeps making mistake after mistake and they seem to be getting worse. We work for a supervisor and a lab manager that do not know blood bank. The major problems started in July of this year. This tech missed 4-5 antibodies in a short period of time. She has also handed out the wrong unit of blood on two occasions. She also falsified patient results at one point. These problems kept compounding on each other and our supervisor seemed to be doing nothing to fix the problems. After taking the matter to HR the tech was "retrained" and given a day off of work. Our supervisor that knows nothing about blood bank was retraining her. She has made minor mistakes on a daily basis since her retraining in December, but she has avoided most antibodies that came to the door. This week she comes receives a specimen with no antibody history. She orders screened units from the reference lab and tells evening shift that the patient has an anti-E and anti-Fyb. She also said that the patient phenotyped positive for c. When the evening shift tech received the screened units and crossmatched them one of the was weakly incompatible. The tech reviewed the panel and she had marked c off on one heterozygous cell and the positive antigen typing. The tech repeated the antigen typing and it was negative. The patient clearly has an anti-c other than 1 heterozygous cell. The situation is brought to the supervisor and she has the tech that made the mistake change her results to match the evening tech's results and left it at that. Is there anything that we can do to stop this tech before she harms somebody? Another tech that made a couple mistakes was moved to another department after just 2 very minor mistakes. Something needs done, but there isn't anyone in the hospital that knows blood bank enough to understand the severity of the mistakes. The tech is too busy texting, talking on the phone, and smoking to pay attention to her work. Even if she paid full attention to her work she is still going to make mistakes. Please, any advise would be appreciated.