Lab Rat or Button Monkey?

I have about staff levels within Pathology for the last couple months.  The trigger for my train of thought was the news that nurses will have to get a degree.  The initial concerns were that degree educated nurses would not want to get their hands dirty doing the routine tasks in the job.  It seems [...]

I have been looking at my training site and updating a few things and in the process I have found several sources of podcasts!  The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has an audio podcast as well as some vidoes. Also, I found the the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, the people behind the Clinical Chemistry journal, [...]

I am currently working in a section with lots of HPLC equipment.  We have recently had the pleasure of several work experience people come and visit our lab and I was asked to show one of these people what I was doing.  I was in the middle of prepearing to do a batch of vitamins A [...]

This is an interesting use of maggots.  I have heard of the use of maggots at removing dead tissue etc but to collect the secretions to use as a potential antibiotic is an interesting proposition.

I saw this page on the BBC Health page.  It suggests that the use of abbreviations should be potentially phased out as it has contributed to 5% of errors in an American study, some of which were fatal.  An example quoted in the article concerns the dose of insulin given to a patient.  The notes [...]

I have been having a re-think about this site.  I’m not too sure what direction I want it to go in at the moment but I will be making slight improvements over time whilst thinking about the future.  One change will be my use of tags on enteries so people can look at related articles.

The laboratory I work in has recently seen a very unusual potassium result. During the afternoon, one of our consultants came across a high potassium result, 13.4, that he suspected might be an EDTA contaminated sample.

This article appeared on the BBC website. As an expectant father, I gave it a read and found it quite interesting. It seems remarkable that such a small thing can profoundly influence the decision process.

It seems the Americans have been looking at various different countries and their health systems. They have concluded that the US is the the worst or second worse on the various different parameters used. According to this survey, the best health system was the NHS. I must read the full report to find out how [...]

Found this site which looks at some unusual medical conditions. http://medtempus.com/archives/top-10-weird-anomalies-in-medicine/