[Blood test results are available sooner if Point of Care testing is established in an emergency room].

To determine patient priority and degree of urgency with an objective high-quality evaluation, general Point of Care testing (POCT) was established as a novel facility in the emergency department at Holbæk Hospital, a laboratory that provides faster results for common lab tests. When evaluating response time from arrival of the patient to the time at which the test results are available, POCT is not a significantly better test method than ordinary test methods. This indicates that in order to benefit from POCT the time before taking blood samples should be reduced to a minimum. Overcrowding needs to be controlled in order to accomplish this.