The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
The spokesperson for the Kowloon Centre Cluster made the following announcement today (December 6) regarding an incident of patient specimens handling:
Robert Black General Out-patient Clinic (RB GOPC) collected deep throat saliva specimen for testing of COVID-19 from 26 patients on December 1, which were scheduled to be sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital laboratory for testing. According to usual practice, the specimens should be placed in a designated collection box to send to the laboratory. However, three specimens were mistakenly placed in the backup collection box by clinic staff and had not been sent out.
One of the patients involved enquired with RB GOPC about the test result on December 4. After investigation, the clinic staff found that three deep throat saliva specimens had been placed in the backup collection box. Since the specimens concerned has not been sent to the laboratory for handling immediately, the clinic has contacted all individuals concerned to resubmit a deep throat saliva specimen to ensure accuracy of the test results. All results were negative for COVID-19.
Kowloon Central Cluster is highly concerned about the incident and apologies to the patients concerned for the inconvenience caused. The clinic will review for the workflow of handling of specimens, and improvement measures will be proposed to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
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