Reconciling What You Sent With What Arrived

Part of Clinical Laboratory (LAB) Training: Dangerous Goods and Documentation.

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

Reconciliation is the control that catches everything else

Counts that balance at each handover mean nothing was lost silently. When they do not balance, you find out while the answer is still knowable.

Reconcile at three points

Before sealing, against the manifest.

On confirmation of receipt, against what the receiving laboratory counted.

Periodically across the study, total sent against total received.

The third one catches the shipments nobody confirmed.

A discrepancy is a question, not an error

The receiving laboratory counted thirty-nine and you sent forty. Either you packed thirty-nine, they counted wrong, or one is missing.

All three are findable. None are findable in six months.

Check your own record first

Before raising it, re-read your packing record and your aliquot log. Roughly half of these resolve in your own paperwork.

That is not a reason to delay. It is a reason to spend ten minutes before you send the query.

Escalate promptly when it does not resolve

The sponsor needs to know a sample is unaccounted for, particularly if it supports a primary endpoint.

There is sometimes still an option, a retained backup aliquot or a repeat draw, and those options expire.

Document the whole exchange

The query, the response, the investigation and the outcome. In the study file, not in an email thread.

An email thread is not a record. It is findable by the person who sent it and nobody else.

Watch for patterns across shipments

One short shipment is an event. A consistent off-by-one is a counting or labeling practice that needs correcting.

Patterns only appear if each instance was recorded. This is the argument for reporting the small ones.