Lab Rat or Button Monkey?

I saw a worrying story on the BBC health site today. It concerns chlamydia screening in the UK.   It seems the story is based on some research which can be found here.  A provional PDF of the research can be found here (Note this link may break in the future).  As the BBC article points out, chlamydia is a “silent infection”.  You do not get any obvious signs of having caught the infection.  With current rates are rising you would like to hope that promoting screening would be a higher proirity.    It still seems that some things are still taboo.

I saw an interesting piece on the BBC news site.  It talked about a report from the Royal College of Surgeons that suggests that the 48 hour per week work limit for doctors is potentially damaging patient care.  The original report can be found here.

Whilst the report does contain some valid points e.g. continuity of care being lost,  these points are not incompatible with a 48 hour limit.  They are incompatible with a 48 hour limit and getting no extra staff to manage the shortfall.  The problems discussed in the report can all be handled if the shortfall in hours is plugged by a similar increase in staff.  I accept the training issues involved in getting these extra people to a required standard  by the European Working Time Regulations have been a long time coming and the underlying training issues could have been addressed by now if action had been taken earlier.

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I seems that the training site has been hit with a large amount of spam accounts.  I am trying to delete them as and when I spot them.  You may notice the odd bit of spam on the site as a consequence.  I will try and remove anything I find.  Please be understanding if I accidently delete your account!

I am currently working on a series of lectures for the Medical Laboratory Assistants in our laboratory.  The lecture series is designed  to provide some background for the MLA on the various tests we perform and hopefully help them to understand some the clinical details they might see to help them in test requesting.

Xanthochromia is one of the lectures I am currently working on.  Whilst performing some research, I found a Youtube clip on performing a Lumbar puncture which I thought might be useful for other people to use.  It did make think that this is a really good way of using Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2_0gOI8uV0

ANOTHER date for your diary.

This is for Frontiers in Laboratory Medicine, or FILM.  You can register your interest at:

http://www.acb.org.uk/site/film.asp

Another date for your diary.  This one is a bit more short notice though.  It is a joint AACC/ACB meeting.  Details can be found here or :

http://www.acb.org.uk/docs/AACC-ACB%20Programme.pdf

Date for your diary, 10th-13th May, Glasgow.  This is the dates for the next Focus meeting.

I have finally got some time to write a review for the Vitamin D podcast from  Clinical Chemistry.

The interview isn’t too long and does not go into great technical depth but is a great listen and I certainly learned a few things from listening to it.  I knew that there are two different sources of vitamin D, diet and production by the body due to exposure to sunlight.  I didn’t realise that animal and sunlight derived vitamin D is Vitamin D3 and invertebrate and plant derived vitamin d is Vitamin D2.

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I have been given some dedicated time at work to work as a Training Officer. I am really looking forward to seeing what I can do with the time and how I can shape the training of people within the laboratory. Watch this space for developments…..

I have listened to the Vitamin D podcast and have enjoyed it. the podcast is fairly short, less than 15 minutes. I will post a full review shortly.