I am a PCT with 5 years experience and have been working at my current unit for 6 months. At first I didn't pay much attention to this but I have noticed a pattern bothers me. Each month on the day we take the patients blood for their labwork, certain patients who are on reuse are given a new dialyzer to use for the treatment that one day. Sometimes the new dialzyers are thrown away after the treatment and sometimes they are re-used for future treatments.

This doesn't seem right to me. I thought we test the patients blood each month to measure the adequacy of their treament - if the blood test is done only with a new dialzyer how does that tell us the adequacy for the other treatments when they using a re-used dialyzer.Why would anyone do this and does it really make a difference in the lab values? I don't know who else to ask about this.