I'm just curious--how many MTs out there who work at hospitals have to go to the floors on a daily basis to collect blood specimens?  Currently, I seem to be working in a state where this is common(and it is causing me grief).

I used to work in a hospital about 53 miles from where I live for almost 5 years. Did all the draws- morning, the-in-betweens all over the hospital, ER, the outpatient department until the day phlebotomist arrives at 8AM. They were just so lucky because I have a great training in phlebotomy when I did my medtech schooling. It's so stressful because it's basically a one-man-show, especially during that time when we had an ER doctor where she orders blood culture on almost everybody including infants and up. Pediatricians changing there protocol to obtain venous draws on newborns instead of capillary. And when they know that you are good, they just call you all the time and even with difficult stick they let you push to do an arterial even though we don't have a clear policy if we are allowed to. The respiratory does our arterial sticks anyways- we just run the test. But when you establish a good rapport with the providers they will push you sometimes. Even though I quit, that wasn't the whole reason why I did- it's the driving that I hate, you waste 2 hours of your day on transit. Before I left, I told the Lab Director that if they want a night technologist to permanently stay they better hire a phlebotomist. It's so taxing to run the lab and deal with your shift's issues and the floors plus the rounds, your stress level is up to the heavens! And don't even let those people speak that will say, oh, they don't need a night phlebotomist, they do nothing and they just sit down all night! Big BULL! Just give me one crappy night that equals to a 5 day workload and you do that almost every night? You're done! I came back to work PRN a year after and they already had a night phelobotomist. I saved the hospital for almost probably over $100,000 while I'm doing both jobs for that almost 5 years. Tough luck if they will give that $100,000 dollars to you. They will take advantage of you if you'll let them. SO the moral lesson of the story?....you COMPLAIN!...and if they do nothing about it? GO and LEAVE and FIND ANOTHER JOB!  Enjoy!

I haven't had to draw blood for over 10 years.  Finally the system realized it was cheaper to hire more phlebotomist than to have their techs draw blood.  I have worked night shift for 25 years and during the first 15, I believe I drew more blood than our phlebotomist as we could not keep one for more than 6 months.  So I got pretty good at it.  I really didn't mind as long as that was all I had to do, but there were instances when I had to draw blood and work in Blood Bank.  At that time, I worked at the major trauma center in our system, and ever night it was so busy we never got to take a break.  Our director and supervisor at the time, finally convinced the hospital management at the time to increase our staff & get us phlebotomy help.  Where I work at now is a suburban hospital slowing becoming larger due to the growth of our community.  We are going to be doing open heart surgeries in the future.  Here the phlebotomy is run by the nursing services. There are different types of problems there.  About the only time, I have to leave the lab is to do bleeding times.  I do miss patient contact.  I know many techs don't, but I miss having a face with a tube of blood.  

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