The sample that never arrived
A patient has bloods taken on Monday morning. The nurse labels the tubes, fills in the request, and the courier collects them for the lab at lunchtime. Results for everyone else come back over the next day or two. This patient's never do.
Nobody notices, because nobody was looking for it. Results are processed as they arrive, one by one, from the lab's feed or emailed PDFs. There is no list of what should have come back. The patient rings nine days later, and only then does someone find that the sample was haemolysed, or never logged by the lab, or had a mismatched label.
Why missing results go unseen
Private GP clinics often send to a private lab such as TDL, and many of them receive results electronically into their practice system. That flow handles what arrives very well. It does nothing about what does not arrive, because a missing result generates no event at all.
The order side is scattered. Some requests are made in the lab's own ordering portal, some on paper forms, some for panels bundled into a health assessment package. There is rarely one list of 'samples sent today' that anyone can compare against 'results received'.
Rejected samples are a special case. Labs report them, but often as a comment line in a result message or a separate email, which is easy to miss in a busy results queue.
What unmatched orders cost the practice
| Situation | What it leads to |
|---|---|
| Sample lost in transit | Patient finds out by chasing, not from you |
| Sample rejected | Repeat bleed arranged late, patient inconvenienced twice |
| Result filed to wrong patient | Order stays open, but nobody is watching |
| Package bloods incomplete | Health assessment report cannot be finished |
| No audit | You cannot show which orders closed and which did not |
Each one is a service failure you only hear about from the patient. A daily list of open orders turns that around, so the clinic makes the call first.
How we reconcile orders against results
- An order log captures every sample sent: patient, tests or panel, sample date, requesting clinician and courier collection. It can be fed from the lab's ordering data, the practice system, or a quick form at the point of taking bloods.
- Incoming results are read from the same place they arrive now, whether that is an electronic feed, an export or emailed PDFs, and matched to orders using the lab number, patient identifiers and test codes.
- Partial results keep the order open until every requested test is back, so a panel with one missing item is not quietly closed.
- Lab comments indicating a rejected or insufficient sample are picked out and flagged to a person straight away.
- Orders still open after the interval you set, per test type, appear on an exceptions list for the nurse or admin lead to chase.
The system reads identifiers and status, not the clinical content of results. Filing, reviewing and acting on results stays with your clinicians exactly as it does now.
What the results queue looks like afterwards
Each morning, someone opens a short list of samples that should have come back and have not. They ring the lab or the patient before the patient has to ring them. Health assessment reports are not held up by a missing test nobody spotted. When the lab asks for a sample reference, it is on the screen.
Over time the log also shows patterns worth raising with the lab or your own team, such as a courier collection that often misses the cut-off, or one type of tube that is rejected more than others. Those are conversations you cannot have without the list.
Is this happening at your clinic?
- Patients sometimes chase results you did not know were missing
- Rejected samples are noticed late
- There is no daily list of samples sent
- Health check reports wait on one missing test
- Orders are placed in more than one place