Rana G Zaini, Haytham A Dahlawi, Abdullah Siddiqi
Despite the remarkable advances and the modern innovations, which have transformed laboratory diagnostics from manual and labor-intensive service to fully automated process, the clinical laboratory still shows a number of pre-analytical errors that might lead to erroneous patient diagnosis and treatment that follows. This is a retrospective study performed to investigate the major causes of pre-analytical errors that led to sample rejection at clinical biochemistry department in the laboratory of Hera’a General Hospital, Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The result of this study revealed that samples with visible haemolysis after centrifugation was the most common cause accounting for 35% of total rejections. Furthermore, this study reported a number of different reasons for sample rejection including; mismatching patient’s information on the tube and request, incomplete patient’s data and clotted samples. Therefore, this study suggests keeping a record of the errors at all stages of the pre-analytical process and then devising corrective strategies for prevention of such laboratory errors.