Another Monday Morning in The Lab

Have you been sleeping at work?

Patient Preparation to Blood Sample Collection

Labquality Days - Nordic Congress on Quality in Laboratory Medicine

Mads Nybo, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Physician, Department of Clinical Biochemistry and Pharmacology, University hospital of Odense, Denmark

The awareness of the importance of preanalytical factors increases exponentially these years as illustrated by this meeting. Many of these factors are difficult to control, among which patient preparation and blood sampling without doubt is crucial for a correct analysis result. However, information about patient preparation often takes place outside the “jurisdiction” of the laboratory, and blood sampling is also often performed by persons outside the laboratory, so these processes seems difficult to control by the laboratory. But the more difficult it seems, the more important it is that the laboratory plays an active role in information regarding these aspects: Knowledge on what influence erroneous patient preparation has on the analysis results and how correct blood sampling is vital for a reliable analysis result is sparse outside the laboratory; an important task is therefore to inform on these issues and to offer tools for quality assessment and quality control outside the lab.

Read more and find full presentation here:
How to guide and prepare the patient and the importance of sampling 

Sourde: Labquality Days
Image credits: Mads Nybo

Global Students' Conference of Biomedical Sciences

The 3rd Global Student's Conference of Biomedical Sciences (GSC Belgrade) that will be held in 20-23 October, 2016 in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. Medical education in scientific research and as well as the acquisition of scientific working skills are of great importance to academic institutions of biomedical sciences on the globe.

Conference goals:

• introducing students to research fields
• presenting results
• acquiring and sharing knowledge and skills
• creating friendships and ideas in future life and work
• implementation of contemporary knowledge of the biomedical sciences

The aims of our conference are to bring undergraduate and postgraduate students of biomedical sciences together and offer them an opportunity to present the results of their investigations and to discuss them with colleagues and leading experts. We also welcome and encourage students of PhD programs to present their research findings at our congress.

Read more (website will be updated soon):
GSC Belgrade Global Students' Conference of Biomedical Sciences in Belgrade

Facebook event:
www.facebook.com/gscbelgrade

Source:CSC Belgrade

Borrelia recurrentis in the blood film

A 17-year-old refugee from Eritrea presented with sudden fever (to 41°C), myalgias, and headache. Three days before admission, he had arrived in Switzerland after a long journey through the Sudan and Libya and across the Mediterranean and Italy. Other than mild anemia, he had unremarkable blood values (hemoglobin, 122 g/L; white blood cells, 5.6 × 109/L; platelets, 187 × 109/L) and an increased C-reactive protein of 55 mg/L. No localizing infection was found by clinical examination, chest radiograph, or urine analysis. During a search for malaria, spirochetes were spotted in the blood film (Giemsa stained, original magnification ×100). Given the travel history and clinical symptoms, louse-borne relapsing fever (LBRF) was diagnosed, caused by Borrelia recurrentis. A treatment with doxycycline for 7 days was effective.

Read more
Unexpected cause of high fever in the blood film

Source: Blood Journal

What is the Pre-analytical Phase?

Labquality Days - Nordic Congress on Quality in Laboratory Medicine

Tim Lang, Dr, FRCPath, Consultant Clinical Scientist Clinical Biochemistry Department, University Hospital of North Durham, UK

Test ordering and collection of samples are important tasks in the pre-analytical phase of the laboratory diagnosis pathway. Over recent years the European Federation for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM) Working group for Preanalytical Phase (WG-PRE) has strived to make quality improvements and harmonize the many aspects of this phase. At the same time laboratories are under pressure to deliver a high quality service to meet the needs of their patients against ever expanding workloads,  increase costs, reduced revenue and inappropriate testing. They are challenged to identify this waste in their processes and remove unnecessary steps in their patients’ journeys.

Read more and find the full presentation here:
Demand management in the preanalytical phase - Labquality

Source: Labquality Days
Image credits: Tim Lang & Plebani

Video: The best moments of Labquality Days

Labquality has published a trending video of Nordic Congress on Quality in Laboratory Medicine. Enjoy feelings and memories from Labquality Days 2016

Read more:
Labquality Days Video

Source: Labquality

Standardization of the colors of the blood collection tube caps

Are you in favor of the standardized colors of the blood collection tube caps?

The European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM) working group for the Standardization of the colors of the blood collection tube closures (TFG-STCC) was established in June 2015, with the aim to initiate and manage a dialog between interested parties in order to achieve the global harmonization of the color coding for blood collection tube closures (caps) and labels.

The TFG-STCC has recently started a close collaboration with the ISO TC76/WG1 on ‘Transfusion, infusion and injection, and blood processing equipment for medical and pharmaceutical use’, which is currently working on the revision of the ISO 6710 standard: 'Single-use containers for venous blood specimen collection’. This revision of ISO 6710 would also replace the current European standard EN 14820.

As we are aware that some barriers and obstacles could put this important project at risk of full implementation, we have decided to set up this short survey in order to gather some feedback from laboratory professionals on the importance and acceptance of such a colour code.

The main aim of the survey is to learn whether EFLM National Societies would be willing to accept an EFLM proposal for the colour coding of the blood tube caps as the European standard. Moreover, if there are institutions, laboratories or individuals which are not in favor of such standardization we would be very interested to understand possible reasons for this.

The results of this survey will provide us an overview of the opportunities and potential barriers for this project.

Open survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TFG-STCC

Source: EFLM, Ana-Maria Simundic, chair of the EFLM TFG-STCC