Wrong Blood in Tubes
Mr. Smith has been working at North West University Hospital for the better part of 30 years as an Advance Nurse Practitioner (APN). During that time he has been exceedingly pleased with the reputation that this facility has received throughout both the metropolis and the state at large. When he was simply a Registered Nurse, he took a hands-on interest in critical human resources processes such as interviewing and screening potential candidates to ensure that they had the proper qualifications to make their work at the hospital as best aligned with the current staff and its company as possible. He took pride in recommending certain individuals to HR, and was rarely wrong about the sort of individuals he helped to hire.
Within the coming 12 months, however, Smith -- who has long been contemplating retirement -- will stop working and dedicate the rest of his life to his family and to working in his garden. As such, he has spent the past couple of years allowing others to fulfill some of the critical responsibilities that he once did, and has been working in more of a supervisory capacity. Gradually Smith has found himself deferring from decisions and allowing others to make choices that affect the outcome of the hospital, its patients, and its staff to get acclimated to doing so when Smith is no longer present.
Recently, however, he has incurred a great deal of alarm that has him now contemplating...
For the past several weeks, there has been a drastic increase in the difficulties that patients are having after receiving routine blood transfusions. Prior to becoming a full-fledged APN Smith worked as a phlebotomist while studying in medical -- the phlebotomy department had been a particular source of pride for him at North West and one of the final areas of his previous hospital-wide overseeing that he had been least inclined to give up. He knows how critical it is to preanalytical lab testing (Lima-Oliviera et al., 2010).Yet this morning when he came in, he was greeted with the news that once again, a patient experienced severe complications after receiving a blood transfusion the preceding night. As the APN who has the most tenure at this institution, Smith makes it a point to punctually arrive and leave everyday at 9 a.m. And 5 p.m., respectively. Only once in the past couple of weeks has a patient experienced discomfort after a blood transfusion during the day shift -- and even then it was due to an excess of antigens that related to a previously denoted auto-immune deficiency disease.
Smith's cause for concern, then, is considerable. He would particularly uncomfortable about retiring from the hospital with a rash of issues related to blood being taken on patients. Additionally, there have been a couple of news stories about some of the complications patients experienced after having their…
