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Inability to process a sample

Posted By CASA

"Inability to process a sample"

About: General practices in Western Isles

(as the patient),

I am visiting an island in Scotland and realised yesterday that I was about to get a UTI. I get these quite often due to a prior operation. I always carry antibiotics and an NHS sample bottle (from my GP in England) .I took a Urine sample to the local GP practice nd they said they would test it and call me.

I started antibiotics as I knew that I could not wait for results of the test.

I went to the GP practice and they said they could not process the sample because I had not used their sample bottle?

This means I will not know which bug caused the infection. Not the end of the world but given I get them regularly it is good to track what bugs are causing the infection. I am surprised that an England based GP sample bottle does not work in Scotland.

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Responses

Response from Denise Symington, Patient Focus Public Involvement, Clinical Governance, NHS Western Isles last week
Denise Symington
Patient Focus Public Involvement, Clinical Governance,
NHS Western Isles

Lead Advisor to NHS Western Isles on Public Engagement and Service Change

Submitted on 25/04/2025 at 11:31
Published on Care Opinion at 11:31

picture of Denise Symington

Dear CASA

Thank you for taking the time to provide NHS Western Isles with your feedback, unfortunately without additional information we are only able to provide a limited response.

From the information you have provided it appears that your sample was rejected by the GP practice and didn't make it to the lab in Western Isles Hospital. We do ask for samples to be sent in bottles containing boric acid to preserve the sample and it may be the sample wasn't collected into one of these. However, we would normally process a sample collected into a plain tube and add a comment to it to highlight there could potentially be contamination.

The collection bottles we use for urine are fairly standard across the UK, unfortunately without knowing more about the tube used we are unable to say why it would have been rejected.

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