GP - no blood bottles left

[Sweetnhappy1]

GP here. Our practice has now run out of blood bottles. We had originally cut right down to urgent blood tests only but now we can't even do those. We had 10 bottles delivered last week. We have 10,000 patients. This is also linked to HGV/Brexit issues but the press is just full of fuel issues

I live in Staffordshire and my GP has completely ran out, struggeling for urgent blood tests still

I think it depends on the blood bottles themselves and which the local labs use. Our stocks have been ok luckily. I don't know what we'd do with only 10 bottles. I feel very worried about where this will end, we're all feeling burnt out in our practice.

@Madwife123

We are back to normal now in the hospital I work in. 2 weeks ago we were told urgent bloods only and now it’s all fine. Not sure why your practice doesn’t have bottles.

Possibly because hospitals are prioritised? Up until last week we were doing urgent bloods only. Now we are totally out of gold tops. I've never worked like this before. It reminds me of when I did my medical student elective in a developing country.

That’s crazy. Here we are running routine non-urgent tests. Surely they could be better distributed to ensure everywhere is able to request urgent bloods as a minimum. That would involve some actual planning and collaboration however which seems to be impossible in the NHS.

I work in the NHS. We have been warned about the shortage for weeks and told to only take necessary/ urgent blood (I work in mental health so this would be for things like medication level checks for antipsychotics etc). My GP booked me a routine blood test a couple of weeks ago and I was really surprised.

So seems it's patchy even within areas.

We're short in Scotland too. Not quite as bad as England though. Have started having to use shorter gold tops and using purple tops in place of grey tops etc.

Seems to be fixing itself now though.

I like how people today are demanding a telephone consultation so they don’t have to drive and use their petrol to see their GP when made a face to face appointment!