Point of Care Patient Testing (POCT) –

POCT for blood gases

you must find at least 4 different point of care test devices for blood gases test from different companies and compare these devices in 20 different criteria as the table and you must write these information in excel sheet. Provide a written summary justifying your recommendations. Make sure you justify your summary using the evidence from your Excel sheet. As this is an executive summary, your text should be no more than one page of writing with a word limit of 250 for the written text.

Point of Care Patient Testing (POCT) – Assignment – Introduction of a new POCT device

Your Assignment:

Scenario: In order to improve patient access and throughput, a management review of the requirements for an emergency department in a small regional hospital without on-site pathology has established the need to provide POCT for blood gases. You have been asked by your manager to provide recommendations for the selection of an appropriate POCT device for these tests.

Provide justification for your choice of device. To do this you will need to develop a selection criteria to compare the available devices. Then you will need to summarise your recommendations and consider any on-going operational procedures required in order to provide quality results for patient testing.

Include in your answer recommendations with regard to:

•   Critical evaluation of testing devices which provide results appropriate to clinical 
requirements (i.e. is the chosen device fit for purpose ?) 


•   Pre-analytical considerations 


o Instructions for patient preparation and sample collection o Patient safety and risk management
o Operator handling & training required

• Analytical considerations
o Frequency and type of quality control (QC)
o External quality assessment (EQA) procedures o Device maintenance requirements

• Post-analytical
o Instructions for the recording / reporting of results

• Other general considerations for testing Some background notes about this assignment:

For the successful completion of this exercise, you will need to think about all the aspects of testing for these analytes. This will include all of the quality specifications as well as the practical considerations such as user friendliness, cost, shelf-life of reagents, portability and so forth. (Note: This is what you would need to do in a work environment if you were asked to select a new instrument – be it lab or POCT).

To do this you would first collate the data and include it in a spreadsheet for comparison. Then once your comparison and decision is made, you would write a brief report for your manager. Such a

Structure:

 Justification = Excel spread sheet: Develop a spreadsheet for your justification and embed it as a linked table in the word document). This spreadsheet should critically compare devices against your selection criteria.

Recommendations = Written (executive) summary: Provide a written summary justifying your recommendations. Make sure you justify your summary using the evidence from your Excel sheet. As this is an executive summary, your text should be no more than one page of writing with a word limit of 250 for the written text.

Referencing: Vancouver style. Place your relevant references at the bottom of your Excel sheet and just add the main references based on your decision to the word document.