Final answer:
To prevent drug toxicity and maintain constant drug levels in patients, phlebotomists perform blood collection for therapeutic drug monitoring. This process involves measuring drug concentrations in blood samples, which is crucial for drugs with a narrow therapeutic range and significant variability in exposure.
Step-by-step explanation:
To maintain constant drug levels and ensure that a drug does not reach toxic levels in a patient, the phlebotomist may be called to perform blood collection for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM). This is a crucial clinical practice aimed at optimizing individual drug therapy, minimizing drug toxicity, and reducing therapeutic costs.
Therapeutic drug monitoring involves measuring drug concentrations in plasma or serum samples and interpreting these results to adjust the dose for the patient. It is particularly important for drugs that have a narrow therapeutic range, significant inter-individual variability in systemic exposure at a given dose, a clear relationship between blood exposure and clinical effect, and a validated bioanalytical method to measure drug concentration in plasma or serum.
Phlebotomists are skilled professionals who perform venipuncture, capillary sticks, and arterial sticks to obtain blood samples for various analyses such as TDM, which are then analyzed by medical technologists or clinical laboratory technologists in medical laboratories.