At our last CAP inspection we were found deficient in this standard because our LIS has a limitation on the number of characters it can print on a specimen label. When the patient name exceeds this limit, the system prints a "+" sign to indicate there are more characters.  Strictly speaking, this label would not match the requisition which contains the complete name.  We require staff to look up the complete name and write in the missing characters on the label.  This is messy and often gets missed.

 

Please share how you deal with truncated patient names at your institution. Acceptable or not? 

^{Our requisition is the 'set of specimen collection labels' submitted with the blood sample container that is identified by a specimen collection label.  So regardless of a truncated long patient name the 'requistion' does match identically to the label on the blood sample container..}

Our policy is that the name on the BB armband is copied off of the patient armband, not the computer label.  The hospital armband allows more characters ( although not infinite) than the lab labels.  Our lab system ( Sunquest ) will have the entire name on the screen for comparison if the name is truncated on the computer label.

You must have had a really picky inspector...I've never had this even asked.

I agree...way too picky. If the truncation is indicated by a "+" and the DOB, MR#, etc all match, I don't see an issue here.