What a Sample Label Has to Carry
A compliant sample label carries four identifiers that must survive the whole journey: two independent patient or subject identifiers, the collection date and time, the sample type, and the collector's identity. It is applied at the point of collection, in the presence of the source, and never in advance — a pre-labelled tube is the single most common cause of a mismatched result.
Everything difficult about labelling comes from that last rule. Pre-labelling saves seconds and is genuinely tempting on a busy round, which is why a training video that only lists the required fields changes nothing. The rule that needs teaching is the timing, not the content. Excluded on purpose is real patient data: identifiers, requisition numbers, and legible barcodes from live samples must be replaced with synthetic examples before anything is published internally.
This template covers the procedure in eight scenes: two on the required fields and why two identifiers rather than one, two on applying the label at the bedside or bench in the correct order, one on verification against the request, one on what to do when a label is wrong or illegible, one on rejection criteria, and one on recording the correction.
