Palko's Medical Laboratory Procedures 3rd Edition by Danielle Wilken, Phyllis Cox

Exercise 45

Dr. Singh is very upset. Mrs. Levy, one of his patients, just informed him that a neighbor had started a rumor that Mrs. Levy’s 13-year-old daughter is pregnant. The neighbor had seen the 13-year-old’s name recorded with a positive pregnancy test result in the POL’s patient test log. The log had been left open on a table near the test collection site where the neighbor had a blood specimen drawn. In fact, the pregnancy test report belonged to a 30-year-old woman with the same name as the13-year-old. Why should this mix-up never have occurred? How could it have been prevented?