Resident doctros waste time drawing blood samples

Resident doctors waste time drawing blood samples – AIIMS

August 25, 2016 Editorial Team

NEW DELHI: Who should draw the blood sample of a patient: the doctor or the nurse? There seems to be a tug of war between doctors and nurses over this with the administration failing to clarify the issue.

Resident doctors have, in fact, gone ahead and declared they would stop doing it from August 26.

“No resident will draw blood samples of patients or generate barcodes as it is the duty of the nursing staff. It is for the administration to make sure that the nursing staff adhere to their duties and that patient care as well as resident training are not compromised,” AIIMS RDA wrote to the director on Tuesday.

[epq-quote align=”align-left”]”Drawing blood and generating barcodes, waste precious learning time (during PG) of resident doctors.”[/epq-quote]

RDA general secretary Dr Harjit Singh Bhatti said resident doctors now have to generate barcodes too.

“We end up spending most of our time in the morning drawing and sending samples alone. There is little time left to look at in-patients and addressing their grievances and we have to rush to OPD,” he said.

In the US and other developed nations, Dr Singh added, hospitals have specialists to draw blood samples and nurses, too, are well-trained to do it.

AIIMS’ nursing union, on the other hand, has written to the institute director, saying that sending blood samples for various investigations is the responsibility of resident doctors and part of their residency programme. A representative of the nursing union said the RDA was trying to impose the task on them, but they won’t do it. “If patient care services are affected due to this, then the institute will be responsible,” the representative said.

Dr Deepak Agarwal, senior neurosurgeon at AIIMS and head of the hospital’s IT division, said, “Error in blood sampling and transfer can lead to serious medical issues. It is an established cause of death even. The doctors are best equipped to do it.”

On the issue of heavy patient load, Dr Agarwal said new recruitments were being made to meet the shortage. According to RDA, the hospital has only seven senior resident doctors against 20 posts and a handful of junior residents to handle over a thousand patients visiting the emergency block daily.

Best practice and Issue in this regard:

Resident doctors get 3 years to get the grasp of the subject. If residents have to do non department related works like drawing hundreds blood samples and generating bar codes on daily basis, there is hardly any time left to learn clinical skills of the concerned department.
In most hospitals either nurses do this work, or they have trained phlebotomist (attached to Labs) who do this work.

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Resident doctors waste time drawing blood samples – AIIMS

Editorial Team

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