Dr David Turner on secondary care’s latest workload dump on GP practices
Yes, it has been confirmed that we GPs now need to undertake urine extraction in our practices.
We were told a few weeks ago about the upcoming changes to how the lab will process urine samples: they will no longer accept samples in the usual red-top containers; instead, GPs will be expected to draw up urine into a syringe provided by the lab ready for processing.
Now, putting aside the fact that we have not been consulted about this and it has been presented to us as a fait accompli, on one level, I can see how this will speed up processing time in the pathology department. But once again, this is at the expense of some of secondary care’s work being unceremoniously dumped on us.
You don’t need to be the world’s worst cynic to have worked out that hospitals are trying to make savings here by cutting back on lab technician time by once again passing on their work, for us to do for them, without any additional funding.
I have yet to hear them say it, but I imagine the hospital laboratory’s argument will go along the lines of, ‘Well it’ll only take a minute or so.’
That may be true, but we do a lot of urine tests. And there is no way that many of our elderly patients are going to be able to cope with this new method of urine sample preparation themselves.
I would estimate that in our practice, we send around 20 to 30 samples of urine for lab analysis each week. That is half an hour a week of extra doctor/nurse time. Two hours a month. Twenty-odd hours a year. See how it adds up? A bit here and a bit there. This is how we have ended up being worked to death in primary care.
I can remember it was not that many years ago when we went from filling in pre-printed pathology request forms to generating our own. In one fell swoop, we took on the cost of paper, printing and time to generate the computer request, all of which would have been done previously at the hospital.
I bore myself with my endless mantra that we must push back against secondary care dumping. On this occasion, though, they really are taking the piss.
Dr David Turner is a GP in Hertfordshire. Read more of his blogs here
We’ve had the same issue here in the North West. Think you are being a bit conservative on the amount of extra time this is taking
There is also the increased risk to many more people using the needles built into this ‘more efficient’ delivery mechanism.
Maybe it’s because of the ‘leaked in transit’ or ‘wrong container’ or ‘no label attached’ samples sent from the primary care.
So now the labs are making sure the sample is sent in a proper way.
Stop moaning.
Send all your stool samples direct to the source. Find the residential address of the CEO for the outsourced lab. @Anonymous and yes some of them might happen be loosely sealed and leak in transit.
Sadly this change in no way fixes anonymous’s list of problems simply exchanging one incorrect leaky unlabelled container for another..
We just refused for infection control reasons and the lab still process ours.
Most practices do not have a formal sluice in which to do the processing – CQC rightly state that you can’t do urine transfers in your clinical rooms.