Good morning readers and welcome to my first blog post.  As this is the first time I've written here I'm a little worried I might babble on while I try to give you some of the background of things I discuss but I'll do my best to keep it short, and maybe even sweet!

I was inspired to start a blog through my job as a biomedical scientist in a blood transfusion lab. Often when I meet new people and tell them I work at a hospital they assume I'm a nurse, some have never even heard of Haematology. So I thought this would be an excellent way to give an insight to lab

Last Wednesday I worked the late shift, this involves running three sections, Haem main lab, coagulation and blood transfusion, completely alone for 3 hours. I've been working at this hospital for 4 months (and have 20 months of experience in my previous hospital - where I worked with a fantastic team!) so feel competent to work alone. This shift however was on another level!
I've never had so many full blood count samples racking up before my eyes.    
                                         

The way a haematology lab works is that patients are bled by nurses or phlebotomist on the ward or patients in the community visit their GP and a sample and test request is sent to the lab.
When I first started in this role any GP work was immediately sent to an alternative lab for testing whilst we continued to provide a service to the wards and emergency department. This has now changed, we test everything, meaning our workload has increased ten fold!
I take a lot of pride in my work, I want to make sure that patients results are available as quickly as possible, and I like to get the lab straight and up to date for the next BMS who takes over for the night shift ... Honestly I can laugh now, but this shift was like a mini workout, running from one end of the lab (blood transfusion) to the other (haematology) for three hours- yup I was sweating!
The worst moment was when I had a call from a doctor asking if blood he'd ordered hours ago was ready, I had to tell him it would be another 40 minutes whilst I test a 2nd sample (when issuing blood we must always have two identical groups on the computer system, for group confirmation, to ensure the correct patient has been bled and prevent fatal ABO incompatibility).
I was even brought to tears, only about 4 tears, I did manage to pull myself together using a whole lot of positive energy. Speaking out loud to myself, 'you can do this, you've been in these situations, you have it under control, you WILL get everything finished by 8pm when the night person comes in'. Unfortunately that wasn't quite the case, it was still a complete mess at 8 pm but I stayed until 9pm and almost everything was clear, that's the thing with CPP (continuous pathology processing) you've never really finished, it just keeps on going - I suppose it's like the saying 'A woman's work is never

I hope you enjoyed my first blog post, please feel free to leave me a comment!

Have a fab weekend 💚🙋💜

Steph