There is some literature that states that you should scrub the Betadine, actually scrub for 30 seconds and let it and then let it dry for 30 seconds. I’ve seen in paper that the drying time is 2 minutes for Betadine. Well if it’s not drying it’s not doing its job in cleansing the area so there’s a potential for contamination the tourniquet was on way too long, you are supposed to leave it on for at most 1 minute. Once the blood flow begins release the tourniquet. I’ve seen blood draws with a use of gloves I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible practice but you need to make sure there’s no latex sensitivity and ask about latex some allergies. You’re not supposed to touch the venipuncture site at once its cleansed then you re-contaminate it, she did that. Did not identify the subject, that’s important drew from a tattooed site, removed the needle with the vial attached and we talked about shaking the vial and correctly did not invert the other vial and then didn’t label any of the vials. Raise your hand if you’ve had a case where the labels have been I mean the vials have been completely unlabeled. Like blank, no name, no date, nothing. It happens I see it sometimes and it’s kind of shocking.
It’s a rigid go to guide if you need to know just Phlebotomy techniques umm this is kind of like a hospital environment. Approach, identify, prepare the patient, verify their diet, ask about any allergy latex sensitivity, position them, clean and air dry the site, prepare the equipment, put on gloves that’s for the the subject’s safety as well as the blood drawers, re-apply tourniquet and uncap the certain needle ask patient to remake fist you don’t want to keep pumping your fist throughout the entire time because that can cause the blood to go into the vial umm at a higher speed and if it goes in too fast that can also cause hemolysis and cause the blood cells to burst, the red blood cells. So establish blood flow, release the tourniquet, fill remove and mix tubes in order of draw, put gauze or band aid on it, discard the sharps and then obviously label the tubes and put the time initials of the blood drawer the officer, date and time. And then pay attention to the handling instruction if it amazes me sometimes there’s troopers that are about 30 miles away from their crime lab, they’ll mail blood through the mail instead of hand delivering it. There are federal requirements on bio hazard markings if you’re going to mail biological samples through the US postal service. Check patient’s arm, thank them that doesn’t really happen in the criminal environment but and then transport the blood to the lab. So this is a an example of a blood draw with draw form from Houston that the officers can rely on I don’t see that much anymore but it’s important that it says read the DIC24 first, that’s important because there are some judges still I think that don’t realize that you can’t just go straight to getting a warrant and getting a blood draw 524015 requires that before any sample is requested that the statutory through warnings be read, that’s the requirement the DIC24 must be read before any sample is requested.