Documenting Time So It Can Be Checked

Part of Clinical Laboratory (LAB) Training: Stability, Timing and the Clock.

About 2 minutes. Free, in your language, no account needed.

Times are cross-referenced, so they must be real

Your processing time will be compared against the site's collection record and the courier's manifest. Inconsistencies get noticed.

That is not a reason to make them agree. It is a reason to record each one accurately at the moment it happens.

Record at the time, not at the end

A log filled in at the end of a shift is a reconstruction. It will contain round numbers, even intervals and times that are too tidy.

Contemporaneous records look uneven because real work is uneven. That unevenness is evidence.

Use one clock

If the bench clock, the centrifuge display and the freezer logger disagree, your records will too.

Agree on a single reference within the laboratory, check it periodically, and note which one you use. This sounds small and it resolves a whole category of apparent discrepancy.

Write the units and the zone

Twenty-four hour time removes the morning and afternoon ambiguity that causes real errors.

On multinational studies, state the time zone or use the convention the manual specifies. A sample collected at 09:00 in one country and received at 08:00 in another is not a time traveler, but the record looks wrong without the zone.

Corrections follow the same rules as any record

If you write a wrong time, do not overwrite it and do not obliterate it.

Strike it through once so the original stays readable, write the correct value, initial and date it, and give the reason. That is the standard for any controlled record, on paper or electronically.

An erased entry looks like concealment even when it was a slip of the pen.

What makes a time record defensible

Somebody who was not there can read it in three years and say what happened, in what order, and how long each step took.

If they have to ask you what you meant, the record has not done its job.