I shall
relate a little episode which happened at work today. I’m still rather
mystified as to what it was all about…
Whilst on
duty I received a phone call at 18.15 on Saturday evening from someone claiming
to be a sister called (let’s say)
Vanessa at another hospital’s A&E. I won’t say where it was… but it was
close enough that it was not unreasonable that we might share care with some
patients.
This
so-called sister was wanting me to tell her a specific patient’s blood group
claiming that if I didn’t tell disclose this information then the patient would
have to have O Neg as she had an Hb of 7.2, and the patient would rather have
her own blood group. They had (and
supplied) all the patient’s demographic data.
This is a perfectly
reasonable request *if* you don’t
know anything at all about blood bank practices.
I wasn't going
to give out any information; certainly this all seemed odd. I told them this
request was highly irregular, and they should contact their own laboratory.
They argued for a bit and then hung up.
I phoned the
BMS at this hospital who confirmed that they would want a blood sample before
doing anything; as is standard practice in pretty much the entire world.
I phoned the
A&E department at that hospital who assured me they had no one named
Vanessa working there.
So… someone
with no understanding of hospital practice was trying to find a named person’s
blood group. A prank call? Someone trying to find out if a certain person was
registered with our hospital’s systems? Someone trying to do a blood
transfusion on their own? Whatever it was I wasn’t going to admit whether or not
I even had any information on the named patient.
I wonder what
that was all about?
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