Rosewood Medical
Center
712 Hospital
Drive, Omaha, Nebraska 68183
______________________________________________________________________________
Memorandum
Date: February 14, 2008
To: Shannon Phillips, Laboratory
Supervisor
From: Dr. Alice Keenan, MD, Director of
AIDS Center
cc: George Jones, CEO Rosewood Medical
Center
Subject: Your Unfortunate slip-up
Shannon, I am writing this memo to you
in regards of the incident with the recent blood sample spill, while the
rolling cart was left unaccompanied. At
the finish of this memo you will know the current status of your role here at
Rosewood Medical Center, and if any changes will be made.
I am aware of your record working here
at Rosewood, and I must say it has been an impeccable record to this point. Shannon, you clearly show the determination
and loyalty that it takes to be a good employee. This does not, however, excuse the serious
mistake that has happened in this case.
There are going to be penalties put in place for you unfortunately. Effective immediately, you will be put on,
what my other colleagues and I have decided to be, a probation period.
The probation period will be over the
span of the next three months. During
this period you will go about your work the same as you always do. In addition to this, I will ask that we meet
once a week to see how things are going and to discuss your performance. If there does happen to be another slip-up,
we will have to take further action, which could possibly be termination of
employment. This action will depend on the seriousness of the mistake. After saying all this, I have complete
confidence in you and your ability to do your work well and efficiently.
At this point I would like to take time
to discuss the incident itself. While
moving the blood samples to our new facility there was no other way to
transport them besides the rolling carts.
Knowing that these samples were of utter importance, you should have
taken great caution during the transport.
The cart should not have been left alone, no matter the situation. As we know one mistake and something bad
could happen, which unfortunately did.
This is taking it to the extreme but, if someone had come into contact
with the blood they could have contracted a disease. This would be terrible for the individual, as
well as all of us here at Rosewood having moral and legal consequences.
We are now in a difficult situation with
the patients. They are still in a weak
and discomforted state from giving the first blood sample. However, we will need to replace the lost
samples by drawing more blood. I have
already been in contact with the doctors of these patients about what we will
need to do. The doctors have then talked
to each patient that is affected by this spill.
Most of the patients are understanding of the situation and are willing
to try to give more blood as soon as they can.
I have decided that in order to make
sure nothing like this happens again, I will send out instructions of how to
care for the blood samples when transporting them. After everyone receives these and read over
them I have planned for all of us to have a meeting to go over these new
instructions. In this meeting I will
discuss my expectations, answer any questions about them, and will look to get
feedback from you guys as well. I have
planned that we have this meeting this Saturday, the 17th of February, in the
conference room on the second floor of our Medical Center.
Thank you Shannon for taking the time to
read this, and I look forward to talking to you more in the future. I hope we can both learn and grow from this
incident so we can see that it never happens again.
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