Important Information

[medway-lady]

Whatever you do, no much how much you trust your RA Team and GP it is essential should something go wrong to have the dates you had blood tests on. From experience you need to be able to confirm when, time and where done. With shared care its even more important you might never need to prove one has got lost but you just might and that is a key bit of information in our RA journey.

[allanah]

Good advice

[springcross]

I always take my yellow card with me but have forgotten to hand it in a couple of times - the problem there is that the results are only on the screen for a month I think and after that, the nurse can't record them because they are gone. I can't understand why they can't go into a file to retrieve them.

[medway-lady in reply to springcross]

We don't have yellow cards here so no record if one gets lost. I'm going to write to hospital and ask for a card record for the patient as this has thrown up a real flaw in the system locally.

[allanah in reply to medway-lady]

Ours is on a computer system shared between hospital and Gps

[medway-lady in reply to allanah]

Yes but if one is lost then it won't be and if like here the hospital doesn't give you a record then you won't know they've lost it as no proof of having the test done.

[allanah in reply to medway-lady]

Yes I'm agreeing your system is poor, ours is on the computer system as they do the blood automatically linked to the bar code, clever system here so they dont often lose them here. But where you are a written record would be helpful

[medway-lady in reply to allanah]

Now thats a good idea ! thank you; i'm pursuing it.

[Dodo1943]

I'm on my second 'purple book' but I also have transferred all the information onto an Excel spreadsheet which enables me to record incidents that might influence 'spikes'.