Minnesota’s New Phlebotomy Program
Taken from Traffic Report, Mn. County Attorney’s Association
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coordinated trough the Dakota County Technical College (DCTC).
This is an exciting new program for Minnesota law enforcement and should prove beneficial to reducing incidents of DWI. It is also an efficient use of resources that both reduces the cost of collecting evidence and reduces the time required to obtain a blood sample, thereby providing the blood test closer to the time of driving. With officers receiving the same training as medical personnel who draw blood, it will be done in a safe manner.
Over the last few years, challenges to the State’s breath testing instrument has changed the way that law enforcement has done business when obtaining tests from DWI violators. Many law enforcement agencies have abandoned the Intoxilyzer and have relied on the fluid test (blood and urine) option to gather this necessary evidence. With 40,000 DWI arrests annually, the ripple effect from the move toward fluid testing has created backlogs at the BCA Lab and DVS (license revocations).
Additionally, law enforcement agencies have encountered budgetary issues when the cost of blood tests comes due. Many agencies spend thousands of dollars paying hospitals and clinics for their time and resources. This has crippled some agencies and hampered their DWI enforcement efforts. In addition, some hospitals have not always been cooperative with collecting evidence under the implied consent law. In some counties, judges order prosecution costs at sentencing as a way to reimburse agencies for these hospital fees. In order to help combat some of these issues, Minnesota has developed a law enforcement phlebotomy program. Training police officers as phlebotomists is neither new nor novel. Several states Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Texas, and Utah) have programs training police officers in the skills required to successfully draw blood samples from DWI suspects and NHTSA has provided Federal funding to some states for this