Assessment of Patients’ Medical Laboratory Request Forms for Compliance in Jos University Teaching Hospital, Jos-Nigeria | Biomedgrid

Background: Medical laboratory request forms are important medium of communication between the physicians and the medical laboratory practitioners. The request form provides demographic information of the patients as well as clinical conditions, clinician, specimen information and the targeted laboratory. Inability of the physician to indicate any of the information mentioned above could pose a negative effect in accurate definitive diagnosis of the patients' disease which could affect proper treatment or management. Aim of study: The study seeks to assess the level of completeness of patients request forms in Jos University Teaching Hospital. Study volunteers and methods: A retrospective study was carried out on 4,310 in and out Patients request forms as filled by the physician and sent to four laboratory departments of the hospital between the period of January and July 2017 having gotten Ethical clearance from the ethical committee of the teaching hospital. Results: The result of the findings revealed that from the 4310 request forms assessed, patient' demographic information, recorded 20.9%, 17.2%, 14.9%, 1.3%, 0.9% and 0.0% incomplete rate for age, ward, department, hospital number, sex and name of the patient respectively. Patients' clinical information revealed 54.7% and 8.0% incomplete rate for patients' clinical data and provisional diagnosis respectively. For Clinician information, incomplete rate of 54.7%, 17.8% and 8.2% was recorded for signature of the doctor, name of doctor and the consultant respectively. On specimen information, an incomplete rate of 98.2%, 9.0%, 7.6% and 2.9% was observed for time of specimen collection, date, nature of specimen and investigation required respectively. On targeted laboratory, the study recorded an incomplete rate of 8.6%. The result also show that from all the 4310 request form assessed, none is 100% completely filled. Conclusion: This study reveals incomplete filling of medical laboratory request forms in JUTH. There is the need to adhere to International Standard Organization guidelines in filling the laboratory request forms for a better patient care and improvement of quality since most decision are taken by the physician or the nurse depends on medical laboratory results.