An international study of the performance of sample collection from patients

Abstract

The rate of mislabelled samples and miscollected samples is 1000-10,000-fold more frequent than the risk of viral infection. Rates of mislabelled samples and WBIT can be tracked as key indicators of performance of an important step in the clinical transfusion process. WBIT episodes represent important 'near-miss' errors. By providing baseline performance data for the collection of patient blood samples, this study may be useful in formulating future national standards of performance for sample collection from patients.