Joseph is a Phlebotomist with ProHealth Care in Waukesha, WI. He walks us through the entire process of a standard blood draw as well as the steps that take place behind the scenes, such as processing the specimens in centrifuges or transporting the samples to other facilities.
Transcript
My name is Joseph Nolty and I am a phlebotomist for Pearl Healthcare. So a phlebotomist is a person who gets blood from a vein using a needle, different gauges, and the blood goes into different tubes, and it's for diagnosis patients' illnesses and diseases. So for a patient have a couple of things that we do. We have them come to the desk, check in. We have them register with us. We look up their labs to see if they have proper labs for their date, from the doctor. And then we, our team, either I or other coworkers would call them back, have them sit in a chair, relax, take off their jacket, raise their sleeve up to about their elbow. And then we would get our equipment together and then we would also then get a tourniquet on the arm, feel for a vein, another term for that would be palpation. And then get a needle together with the tube, and then put it into the vein and draw the blood. After the phlebotomist has drawn the blood, they give it to you, you would check it into an electronic database so it's electronically tracked. And then you could, for most tests, we spin down in a centrifuge which is a device that spins blood and separates the blood from its elements, such as plasma or serum, depending on the tube. And then also we would then, after it's been tested and checked by the medical lab technologist, we would perhaps keep it for about three days on site, or it can also go out to a different site which is either a hospital or another lab. We work usually average around eight to nine hours, and you have different days. So you could have off, if you work a weekend, you usually have two days off during the week to compensate. And you would then come in, see what task you're assigned. We have a little schedule that tells us what task we're assigned. We could be a drawer; we could also be a desk person checking in patients. We could also be in the lab processing, which is processing people's samples after the blood is given. And then also would could be a driver, which means that we would then go from our clinic to on-site to a hospital for delivering blood.
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