Updates

Phlebotomy has more than one certifying body and they do not share an exam. Blending them produces pages that are wrong for everybody. The blueprint here is the NHA Certified Phlebotomy Technician test plan, based on a job analysis completed in 2024: 100 scored items plus 20 pretest items in two hours, across five domains whose item counts are also their percentages. The ASCP Phlebotomy Technician credential has its own clearly labelled comparison page and is not mixed into the blueprint.

NHA's test plan names the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute twice, at knowledge statement k25 and at task 2O. So the order of draw taught here is CLSI's own published statement of the sequence in GP41, with the exception CLSI spells out: only blood culture tubes, glass nonadditive serum tubes, or plastic serum tubes without a clot activator may be collected before the coagulation tube. GP41 itself is not free to read and nothing beyond CLSI's published article is restated.

The WHO phlebotomy guidelines give each tube's additive, how it works and the tests it serves, and that detail is used here. Its Table 2.3 sequence is not: WHO states the table is based on a United States National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards consensus from 2003, which is superseded by CLSI GP41. Where the two differ, this site follows CLSI and says which source each fact came from.

NHA knowledge statement k59 includes the number of tube inversions, but neither CLSI's published article nor the WHO guidelines state a count per tube. WHO's instruction is to invert additive tubes for the required number of times as specified by the local laboratory, and NHA's own task 3N points at manufacturer guidelines. Rather than copy one manufacturer's figures and present them as universal, this site teaches the principle and sends you to the tube insert.

ASCP's own PBT page confirms a non-refundable application fee of $155 and seven eligibility routes. It does not state the question count, the time limit or the passing score, and the ASCP content-guideline PDF returned a 404 when checked on 22 September 2026. Those three figures are therefore absent from this site rather than repeated from a secondary source, and the comparison page links to ASCP's content guidelines instead.