Procedural Drift

At our lab, procedural drift is more like a torrent than a drift. Some people even have to remind the Supervisor to look at the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to remind him of the proper procedure. Reasons for this are manifold.

Most of the SOPs are out of date, some by years, if not decades. And this is because the supervisors have all they can do to satisfy Corporate bureaucratic red tape and paperwork that they have no time to update procedures.

Technologists are few in number and overworked. We never seem to have a full staff. This means training new people is rushed and slipshod, and leaves the new people to figure things out for themselves a lot of the time. It also means that Technologists can't take the time to look up procedures when they are not sure, and so they sometimes make it up as they go along.

Busy supervisors mean they do not have the time to monitor the work of the technologists and enforce proper procedures. Mostly, monitoring consists of correcting mistakes when someone complains about them. Otherwise some mistakes just go unnoticed.

Procedures are not indexed, not in a central location and not easy to find.

All these reasons, and probably more, are attributable to the mega corporation who owns the lab having profit as their bottom line, not patient care or client service. This seems to keep coming around and biting them in their behinds.