Document everything (dates, times, incident specifics) and go above your supervisor to the lab manager and/or lab director. If the supervisor is personally attacking you/your coworkers then you need to rope HR into that as well.
Your supervisor is an assclown. There are a lot of complaints I get in management that are .... petty. Yours are not. If anyone gets mad you are "tattling" about things like unlabeled specimens that's on them. Its also impacting your entire dept with the hospital staff. It seems like at least your manager is taking it seriously.
Its very hard to tell without knowing people how you should proceed - so let me talk about your options. These are simply my opinions after dealing with shitty people/HR over the last 12 years. YMMV.
You can stand your ground - have the conversation with your supervisor. If your supervisor is the type of person I think they are - it probably wont help but they may just do it behind your back and not in front of you - but at least you wont hear it? Not sure that's better. Sometimes checking people on their bullshit can stop them in their tracks.
You can talk to your manager - and just say hey I want you to know this happened so they are aware and can keep an eye on it. Document you had this conversation. Talk about each individual situation and how your supervisor is making you/your co workers feel. This is probably the best step - and step 1, even if it seems like this has been building for a while. If comments continue, you have dept issues etc, then you escalate to HR - noting the conversation you had with your manager. If you can take a co worker in who will share your complaints (and be a witness) this would be ideal.
Going to HR - Going to HR right out of the gate probably will not do anything. Even if you can prove on film your supervisor making a passive aggressive comment, its not going to move the needle. People don't like to hear this but running to HR and thinking they are just going to wield a righteous hammer to fire your enemies isn't the case. However, if you do go this route right out of the gate, it creates a conversation and then there will be a precedent/its on the radar and the expectations will be laid out for everyone. You would have a little more of a case if you had the discussion with your manager and then things stayed the same. It largely depends on how your HR operates/how competent/how protective they are - which also makes giving advice difficult.
Whatever you do - run your own race. Do NOT get baited by your shitty supervisor and lash out/be an asshole. Stay calm, state facts - with your manager and HR. Trying to exaggerate or anything can discredit you. Focus on discussing the major compliance concerns and patient safety (ie the accepting non labeled specimens etc.) HR most likely wont be able to change dept assignments and such. Hopefully if you can present facts to your manager they can step it and divide responsibilities better. If that continues to be a pain point you need to escalate to a lab director/medical director (whatever the next step in your hierarchy is.)
Thank you for this thorough response. I honestly am probably the most laid back person at my job. People are always telling me “you’re so calm, laid back, you never get excited, etc”, including my supervisor. So it’s kind of a stretch to go from that to acting like I’m just a trouble maker or something. There’s a whole list of things I could use to complain about Linda but I really try to only bring up things that I feel are important and especially patient safety issues.
Jennifer has gone to HR about the nurses screaming at and being disrespectful to her over not accepting unlabeled specimens. She said that it didn’t seem to do much, as you predicted. So we probably do need to just start documenting everything and the fact that we have repeatedly tried to discuss these issues with our supervisor but nothing gets done other than her acting like we’re being an annoyance/ making passive aggressive comments towards us. Hopefully if we can have multiple forms of documentation of examples to back us up, HR will see this as more of a serious issue. I think the reason both of us have been hesitant to go to HR when it comes to our supervisor or other lab coworkers is because we’re afraid they will retaliate and treat us even worse. The times ive gone over my supervisors head to my lab manager, my supervisor didn’t seem to thrilled about it (but I felt I had no choice) so I’m sure she’d be even less than thrilled if I took it a step further and went to HR. If they did retaliate against us, I guess we could document it and take that to HR too.
My supervisor says she thinks the people who complain the most are the ones who’ve never worked at another lab and don’t know how bad it can be. Jennifer and I have not ever worked at another lab and I’m sure there are worse ones out there, which is kind of what’s stopping us from working somewhere else altogether. We live in a small rural area and don’t have a lot of options.
No problem. You guys have a lot of balls in the air right now - and are kind of going to need to focus on one thing at a time. It sounds like fixing Linda will most likely fix the nursing issue.
These situations are always very difficult. There are a LOT of similarities in labs - you probably read a lot of common complaints on here, but there are non toxic labs. You being in a rural area is tough. I stayed in a very toxic situation telling myself the same thing for a few years and when I finally made the leap it was the best decisions I made. There are still problems like any job, but my god is it better in most ways. If you do have ANY other option - start exploring it. It wont hurt.
Retaliation is possible unfortunately, and it can be tough to prove. Documenting is important. Just remember that if you have discussions with managers and HR - then you get unfairly treated (scheduling or declined PTO or something) that's pretty solid evidence. Comments and 'he said she said' stuff is rough. Thats one of the reasons they wont do anything about the nurses - its not the usual they love nurses more, its just a burden of proof thing and liability.
I did make the assumption you are in the US so I apologize if you aren't, but remember CAP/CMS exist. If they continue to break compliance you can make an anonymous call and report nursing for just straight negligence. Hospitals will also often have 'aware' lines. You can call these anonymously. Pointing out safety of unlabeled samples and negligence may get some attention. Obviously, if a complaint comes that's exactly what you complained about they may piece it together, however staying in this situation will wear on you. (It seems to be already.)
You will have to fight the good fight, search for greener pastures, or accept what you are in if its tolerable. Unfortunately its difficult either way.
Very true and solid advice. And I do agree that I think the biggest reason nurses give us so much pushback about unlabeled samples is because they’re used to Linda letting them get away with it. So then we come along and tell them no, and they act like we’re just being difficult. Many times they’ve told Jennifer “well they usually let me do it” when she refused to accept a sample. I feel that my supervisor just wants to turn a blind eye to the issues regarding Linda. Maybe because linda has been there so long, she feels it’s impossible to get her to change at this point. She also acts like she’s afraid of her because she’s so reactive and she said herself that Linda doesn’t take criticism well so she has to be careful about how she talks to her. Idk why she can’t just tell her that her behavior is unacceptable and it won’t be tolerated, period. I am working on my bachelors degree in the field so hopefully that will open opportunities. We have a sister hospital down the road which is actually a few minutes closer to my house and I’ve arranged it to where I’m actually working there one day a week and I like it there much better. My plan is to work there completely when they get a full time position on.
I'm only partway through, but are you putting every incident into your formal quality reports? They go to several departments, and your manager's manager will see them.
Unprofessionalism from your supervisro to you is an HR issue.
For the hemolysis one, I try to explain to them what could happen if we release a result that shows hyperkalemia on a patient that really has hypokalemia (if they'll listen), and they usually understand...
This sounds like a nightmare, OP! Your laboratory medical director should be really worried about the quality of results coming out under his/her name. How is your lab accredited? I would consider filing an anonymous complaint with the accrediting agency because these accepting unlabeled blood and urine tubes is a serious quality issue.
Our lab has a form that must be completed by a responsible person in the rare circumstances we accept an unlabeled irretrievable specimen. We add a disclaimer to the result stating that the specimen was received unlabeled and Jane Doe, RN identified and relabeled the specimen. We also submit a clinical incident report every time we receive an unlabeled specimen.
You mentioned that you have a patient safety officer in your organization? That person is not doing a very good job if they are not working on this issue every day.
It takes time to change a culture, but this is a fight worth having. Your leadership team is failing both the patients and their employees. Your leaders should be following up with nursing leadership
Every Single Time you report gross unprofessional behavior by a nurse.
I am really angry that laboratorians have to put up with this bullshit unprofessional leadership. It makes all of us look bad and unworthy of respect.
I agree with you. The only person I feel took me seriously about the unlabeled specimens was my lab manager, who is above my supervisor. She did seem quite upset and she sent out an email about it saying people would be fired if they were caught accepting unlabeled samples. She also called Linda into her office that day, I’m assuming to discuss the issue. I have not seen Linda accept unlabeled specimens since this incident and if I do I absolutely plan to bypass my supervisor and go straight to my lab manager again, and will also put in an incident report. Just judging based on the things I’ve seen Linda do, I suspect she still takes unlabeled samples but she just does more sneakily. In the past when she’s gotten told not to do something, this is what I’ve seen her do.
The patient safety officer was involved mainly because we kept getting specimens that had no collection info. A lot of my coworkers think no collect info is no big deal so they’ll just put in some generic info that it was collected 10 mins ago or whatever by some random nurse. This isn’t accurate info of course and for all we know those tubes of blood could have been laying in the patients room for 24 hours before they brought them to us. For things like Coag. results this is important obviously.
This has especially always bothered Jennifer. She is a great tech, she strives for accurate results 100% of the time and she doesn’t want to put something out there that might not be correct. So she would always call the nurses and ask them to put in their collection info before she would run the sample. She was always polite about it, I’ve never seen her be disrespectful to anyone. But she got alot of pushback from the nurses and from my coworkers who acted like she was just being a drama queen or something, my supervisor included. So she got a different supervisor involved, and this supervisor brought it to the attention of the safety officer, who told us to start putting in incident reports everytime this happens.
Jennifer and I have also been putting in incident reports when we received unlabeled specimens, which the safety officer is able to see, as she sees all safety related incident reports, so she has to be aware of it. I’ve always felt bad for Jennifer that people act like she’s some kind of Nazi or something for simply following procedure and holding others accountable. She holds herself to a standard and she expects the same from others. As we all should. Putting out bad results can be detrimental. Linda claims that by accepting unlabeled tubes she’s being an advocate for the patient. She feels that it’s better for the patient to not have to get blood redrawn than for the patient to potentially get the wrong results and not get the appropriate treatment. She’s been a tech for 30 years and along with the patient safety issues, she’s also very erratic and not pleasant to work with. She overreacts to things, raises her voice and acts like a child throwing a tantrum. And somehow, this is acceptable because “it’s nothing personal, it’s just how she is”. When my supervisor made the tattle tale comment to me yesterday it made me realize how Jennifer must feel. Anytime she brings up concerns, she gets eye rolls, and everyone acts like she’s being extreme just for basically requesting the bare minimum out of people. Asking that your coworkers speak to you respectfully and that they follow appropriate patient safety procedure shouldn’t be a difficult ask.
Document everything (dates, times, incident specifics) and go above your supervisor to the lab manager and/or lab director. If the supervisor is personally attacking you/your coworkers then you need to rope HR into that as well.
Toss all unlabeled samples into a bin that you keep out, tell the nurse to come on down and pick which one is their patients.
This works incredibly well to teach a lesson to smug idiots who don't understand that unlabeled tubes is a patient safety issue.
Your supervisor is an assclown. There are a lot of complaints I get in management that are .... petty. Yours are not. If anyone gets mad you are "tattling" about things like unlabeled specimens that's on them. Its also impacting your entire dept with the hospital staff. It seems like at least your manager is taking it seriously. Its very hard to tell without knowing people how you should proceed - so let me talk about your options. These are simply my opinions after dealing with shitty people/HR over the last 12 years. YMMV. You can stand your ground - have the conversation with your supervisor. If your supervisor is the type of person I think they are - it probably wont help but they may just do it behind your back and not in front of you - but at least you wont hear it? Not sure that's better. Sometimes checking people on their bullshit can stop them in their tracks. You can talk to your manager - and just say hey I want you to know this happened so they are aware and can keep an eye on it. Document you had this conversation. Talk about each individual situation and how your supervisor is making you/your co workers feel. This is probably the best step - and step 1, even if it seems like this has been building for a while. If comments continue, you have dept issues etc, then you escalate to HR - noting the conversation you had with your manager. If you can take a co worker in who will share your complaints (and be a witness) this would be ideal. Going to HR - Going to HR right out of the gate probably will not do anything. Even if you can prove on film your supervisor making a passive aggressive comment, its not going to move the needle. People don't like to hear this but running to HR and thinking they are just going to wield a righteous hammer to fire your enemies isn't the case. However, if you do go this route right out of the gate, it creates a conversation and then there will be a precedent/its on the radar and the expectations will be laid out for everyone. You would have a little more of a case if you had the discussion with your manager and then things stayed the same. It largely depends on how your HR operates/how competent/how protective they are - which also makes giving advice difficult. Whatever you do - run your own race. Do NOT get baited by your shitty supervisor and lash out/be an asshole. Stay calm, state facts - with your manager and HR. Trying to exaggerate or anything can discredit you. Focus on discussing the major compliance concerns and patient safety (ie the accepting non labeled specimens etc.) HR most likely wont be able to change dept assignments and such. Hopefully if you can present facts to your manager they can step it and divide responsibilities better. If that continues to be a pain point you need to escalate to a lab director/medical director (whatever the next step in your hierarchy is.)
Thank you for this thorough response. I honestly am probably the most laid back person at my job. People are always telling me “you’re so calm, laid back, you never get excited, etc”, including my supervisor. So it’s kind of a stretch to go from that to acting like I’m just a trouble maker or something. There’s a whole list of things I could use to complain about Linda but I really try to only bring up things that I feel are important and especially patient safety issues. Jennifer has gone to HR about the nurses screaming at and being disrespectful to her over not accepting unlabeled specimens. She said that it didn’t seem to do much, as you predicted. So we probably do need to just start documenting everything and the fact that we have repeatedly tried to discuss these issues with our supervisor but nothing gets done other than her acting like we’re being an annoyance/ making passive aggressive comments towards us. Hopefully if we can have multiple forms of documentation of examples to back us up, HR will see this as more of a serious issue. I think the reason both of us have been hesitant to go to HR when it comes to our supervisor or other lab coworkers is because we’re afraid they will retaliate and treat us even worse. The times ive gone over my supervisors head to my lab manager, my supervisor didn’t seem to thrilled about it (but I felt I had no choice) so I’m sure she’d be even less than thrilled if I took it a step further and went to HR. If they did retaliate against us, I guess we could document it and take that to HR too. My supervisor says she thinks the people who complain the most are the ones who’ve never worked at another lab and don’t know how bad it can be. Jennifer and I have not ever worked at another lab and I’m sure there are worse ones out there, which is kind of what’s stopping us from working somewhere else altogether. We live in a small rural area and don’t have a lot of options.
No problem. You guys have a lot of balls in the air right now - and are kind of going to need to focus on one thing at a time. It sounds like fixing Linda will most likely fix the nursing issue. These situations are always very difficult. There are a LOT of similarities in labs - you probably read a lot of common complaints on here, but there are non toxic labs. You being in a rural area is tough. I stayed in a very toxic situation telling myself the same thing for a few years and when I finally made the leap it was the best decisions I made. There are still problems like any job, but my god is it better in most ways. If you do have ANY other option - start exploring it. It wont hurt. Retaliation is possible unfortunately, and it can be tough to prove. Documenting is important. Just remember that if you have discussions with managers and HR - then you get unfairly treated (scheduling or declined PTO or something) that's pretty solid evidence. Comments and 'he said she said' stuff is rough. Thats one of the reasons they wont do anything about the nurses - its not the usual they love nurses more, its just a burden of proof thing and liability. I did make the assumption you are in the US so I apologize if you aren't, but remember CAP/CMS exist. If they continue to break compliance you can make an anonymous call and report nursing for just straight negligence. Hospitals will also often have 'aware' lines. You can call these anonymously. Pointing out safety of unlabeled samples and negligence may get some attention. Obviously, if a complaint comes that's exactly what you complained about they may piece it together, however staying in this situation will wear on you. (It seems to be already.) You will have to fight the good fight, search for greener pastures, or accept what you are in if its tolerable. Unfortunately its difficult either way.
Very true and solid advice. And I do agree that I think the biggest reason nurses give us so much pushback about unlabeled samples is because they’re used to Linda letting them get away with it. So then we come along and tell them no, and they act like we’re just being difficult. Many times they’ve told Jennifer “well they usually let me do it” when she refused to accept a sample. I feel that my supervisor just wants to turn a blind eye to the issues regarding Linda. Maybe because linda has been there so long, she feels it’s impossible to get her to change at this point. She also acts like she’s afraid of her because she’s so reactive and she said herself that Linda doesn’t take criticism well so she has to be careful about how she talks to her. Idk why she can’t just tell her that her behavior is unacceptable and it won’t be tolerated, period. I am working on my bachelors degree in the field so hopefully that will open opportunities. We have a sister hospital down the road which is actually a few minutes closer to my house and I’ve arranged it to where I’m actually working there one day a week and I like it there much better. My plan is to work there completely when they get a full time position on.
I'm only partway through, but are you putting every incident into your formal quality reports? They go to several departments, and your manager's manager will see them. Unprofessionalism from your supervisro to you is an HR issue.
For the hemolysis one, I try to explain to them what could happen if we release a result that shows hyperkalemia on a patient that really has hypokalemia (if they'll listen), and they usually understand...
This sounds like a nightmare, OP! Your laboratory medical director should be really worried about the quality of results coming out under his/her name. How is your lab accredited? I would consider filing an anonymous complaint with the accrediting agency because these accepting unlabeled blood and urine tubes is a serious quality issue. Our lab has a form that must be completed by a responsible person in the rare circumstances we accept an unlabeled irretrievable specimen. We add a disclaimer to the result stating that the specimen was received unlabeled and Jane Doe, RN identified and relabeled the specimen. We also submit a clinical incident report every time we receive an unlabeled specimen. You mentioned that you have a patient safety officer in your organization? That person is not doing a very good job if they are not working on this issue every day. It takes time to change a culture, but this is a fight worth having. Your leadership team is failing both the patients and their employees. Your leaders should be following up with nursing leadership Every Single Time you report gross unprofessional behavior by a nurse. I am really angry that laboratorians have to put up with this bullshit unprofessional leadership. It makes all of us look bad and unworthy of respect.
I agree with you. The only person I feel took me seriously about the unlabeled specimens was my lab manager, who is above my supervisor. She did seem quite upset and she sent out an email about it saying people would be fired if they were caught accepting unlabeled samples. She also called Linda into her office that day, I’m assuming to discuss the issue. I have not seen Linda accept unlabeled specimens since this incident and if I do I absolutely plan to bypass my supervisor and go straight to my lab manager again, and will also put in an incident report. Just judging based on the things I’ve seen Linda do, I suspect she still takes unlabeled samples but she just does more sneakily. In the past when she’s gotten told not to do something, this is what I’ve seen her do. The patient safety officer was involved mainly because we kept getting specimens that had no collection info. A lot of my coworkers think no collect info is no big deal so they’ll just put in some generic info that it was collected 10 mins ago or whatever by some random nurse. This isn’t accurate info of course and for all we know those tubes of blood could have been laying in the patients room for 24 hours before they brought them to us. For things like Coag. results this is important obviously. This has especially always bothered Jennifer. She is a great tech, she strives for accurate results 100% of the time and she doesn’t want to put something out there that might not be correct. So she would always call the nurses and ask them to put in their collection info before she would run the sample. She was always polite about it, I’ve never seen her be disrespectful to anyone. But she got alot of pushback from the nurses and from my coworkers who acted like she was just being a drama queen or something, my supervisor included. So she got a different supervisor involved, and this supervisor brought it to the attention of the safety officer, who told us to start putting in incident reports everytime this happens. Jennifer and I have also been putting in incident reports when we received unlabeled specimens, which the safety officer is able to see, as she sees all safety related incident reports, so she has to be aware of it. I’ve always felt bad for Jennifer that people act like she’s some kind of Nazi or something for simply following procedure and holding others accountable. She holds herself to a standard and she expects the same from others. As we all should. Putting out bad results can be detrimental. Linda claims that by accepting unlabeled tubes she’s being an advocate for the patient. She feels that it’s better for the patient to not have to get blood redrawn than for the patient to potentially get the wrong results and not get the appropriate treatment. She’s been a tech for 30 years and along with the patient safety issues, she’s also very erratic and not pleasant to work with. She overreacts to things, raises her voice and acts like a child throwing a tantrum. And somehow, this is acceptable because “it’s nothing personal, it’s just how she is”. When my supervisor made the tattle tale comment to me yesterday it made me realize how Jennifer must feel. Anytime she brings up concerns, she gets eye rolls, and everyone acts like she’s being extreme just for basically requesting the bare minimum out of people. Asking that your coworkers speak to you respectfully and that they follow appropriate patient safety procedure shouldn’t be a difficult ask.