Notificação de valores críticos em laboratório de patologia clínica da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The term critical value or panic value described by Lundberg for more than three decades refers to any laboratory result that is life-threatening to the patient, needing to be informed urgently to the requesting physician or someone trained to receive such information. The critical results are set out in a consensus list by the laboratory's medical staff and should be limited in order not to impair the effectiveness of the notification. After the laboratory identifies the critical result, he has to initiate the notification process, recording the information in the quality document and contacting the requesting physician. The absence of standardization of critical values of the laboratory as well as its identification and notification to the requesting physician so that the physician can take notice and adopt measures for the patient's well-being make this work of great relevance for the hospital environment and for the patient looking for the laboratory. In order to establish the registry of the results with critical values in the laboratory as well as the notification of the same to the requesting physician as a diagnostic aid tool, it was regulated through the preparation of a standard operating procedure the methodology to be followed when verifying a critical result and its communication to the responsible physician. A total of 68 patients were reported in the Polyclinic Piquet Carneiro outpatient clinic from July 2017 to March 2018. These patients belonged to 10 different clinics and only 2 patients did not have the description of the prescribing clinic. The most reported examination was INR with 32 patients, most of them came from cardiology. Owing to the university to be an environment that houses a significant number of resident physicians, direct communication with the requesting physician has proved to be ineffective, and the policy of notifying the person present at the clinic requesting the examination has been adopted.