Effectiveness of an Educational Intervention to Reduce Preanalytical Specimen Errors

A rejected blood specimen can be very costly to a hospital as well as to the patient. Many errors occur in the preanalytical phase in which nurses and assistive personnel are often involved because they are usually not trained to do so. This staff education project was designed to decrease the number of laboratory rejections of blood specimens in a local hospital setting. Knowles’s adult learning theory was combined with the knowledge translation framework, proposed by Fredericks, Martorella, and Catallo, so that evidence-based changes in practice could occur more readily. There is a 20-minute in-service educational intervention followed by an orientation in the outpatient laboratory to gain phlebotomy experience and competency. The proposed project has elements of intervention, data collection and assessment. A pretest and posttest, developed for this project, would be administered prior to, and 6 weeks after, the educational intervention, respectively. A competency checklist would be completed by a phlebotomy preceptor in the lab for the employee file. Data collection would occur in the laboratory for 3 months prior to the educational intervention and then resume for 3 months after the phlebotomy competencies are complete. Pre- and post-intervention data would be compared to determine project success. A panel of experts conducted a formative review of the project via a five-question, Likert scale questionnaire. The data compiled from this review revealed that the project has merit and is a relevant solution to fill the current gap in practice. Further research is necessary to determine the full benefit of its implementation; however, this staff educational project could be put into practice in any hospital that is experiencing a significant number of rejected blood specimens. The implementation would provide the data to analyze to determine the full potential of the project