A Perspective

When I go to work and see the same mistakes happen again and again, I get discouraged. I see the way some techs work, their poor skills, their unwillingness to improve. I see supervision addressing the problems of broken equipment, budgets, scheduling, and not work habits that cause delays, errors, and poor results. I began……

What Does That Study Mean?

My daughter recommended the topic for my last post: Hospital Quality and Care. She had seen a number of advertisements by drug companies that claimed their drug would help cancer patients. I commonly comment on these types of advertisements and she wanted to me explain to you how I determine when drugs are good or bad.……

Hospital Quality and Care

Every hospital has its week and strong areas of care. The number of nurses per patient, chances of getting infected with MRSA, the death rate during various surgical procedures, and the types of care provided are a few examples of the ways in which a hospital might be considered. As a patient, once admitted, you……

Will Your Doctor Tell You When They Error?

  A case I remember well involved a simple endometrial scraping, a curetting, a common type of specimen. An error occurred and it nearly resulted in a patient getting treatment for cancer that she didn’t have. As a patient, do you think the lab should have reported this error? It caused the patient no harm.……

Friday and You

Fridays can be a bad day to have a biopsy taken. To explain why, I’ll give you the following, a phone call that came in to my lab on a Friday afternoon. To understand this call, I work in a large lab that receives specimens from other hospitals and the call is about a biopsy the……

Where to go for Care

Care varies with the size of the institution. As a patient, this information can be important in choosing a hospital. In my experience, there is a direct relationship between the degree of expertise of a lab, pathologist, or surgeon based on the size/type of the hospital. Local Community Hospital A local community hospital does not usually……

Special Staining on Your Biopsies, Waste, Teaching, and CYA

This week I am working in the special stains area of Histology. That is where we stain your biopsy, a slide made from your biopsy actually, and add colors to it so pathologists can see things better. Every biopsy has an H+E done on it. That is a pink and blue stain. Here is an……

Trash

Patient biopsies can be accidentally thrown away. When I first started this job they didn’t save the trash, as was common practice at other jobs. They tossed out a few biopsies, as happens once or twice a month, and couldn’t retrieve them because the trash was taken away the night before. Now they save the trash. They save……

Lost

You have had a mole removed. It could be cancer. It looked suspicious enough that your doctor removed it. He sent it to the lab and you never received a diagnosis. The specimen was lost. You can’t resubmit the specimen like you could blood or urine. It’s gone. What happens now? Did you get a……

The Hidden Lab

Have you ever wondered what happens to biopsies? TV shows gloss over the reality. What they do, of course, is a myth. Your biopsies go to Histology labs.  Such labs are usually tucked away in a mass of other labs and rarely visited. Chances are you don’t even know it exists. The only time you might visit……