The minefield of potential mistakes
From the idealized life cycle, one realizes that opportunities for unwanted “events” lurk at several points. It is a testament to the proficiency of our systems that truly injurious blunders, particularly in relation to the high volume of material processed by pathology laboratories, are not all that frequent. Technical failure at a level that does not affect patient care occurs in even the best of pathology units, and these lapses are monitored and managed internally via quality controls. Among these errors, however, are some that can have a profoundly adverse effect on patient care. The sources of the unwanted bad things that can happen may be envisioned as pre-lab, intra-lab, and post-lab. Here are some examples of what might occur in each of these phases.