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Unnecessary repeat requesting of tests can make up a large proportion of a laboratory's workload. It is often difficult to know whether a repeated request is unnecessary because re-testing may be helpful for many chemistry or haematology tests. This audit set out to establish the size of this problem in an immunology laboratory. This setting is informative because most immunology tests are slow to change and repeat testing within a short time serves no useful clinical purpose. We also tried to identify the circumstances under which these repeat requests were made because this information might suggest what action could be taken to reduce the rate of such requests. We selected three tests commonly requested from the immunology laboratory, the results of which are unlikely to change greatly over short time …
Huissoon et al. (2002) studied this question.