In a classic Twilight Zone episode called ''A Stop at Willoughby,'' an advertising executive falls asleep on a commuter train and awakens to find himself in a slower, gentler time, a departure from the exasperation and desperation of his ''career.'' There are many days, at least in terms of quality management, where I feel the laboratory is ...

Laboratories make their share of errors, and good laboratories have a way to track them so they can be fixed. A number of approaches work, including incident reports, problem forms, log sheets, and random audits. Response depends on severity. Forgetting to check off performance of daily maintenance, for instance, is not as bad as dispensing the ...

The other week I watched a show on the Discovery channel in disbelief. Called Pig Bomb, it described hoards of feral pigs roaming the Southeast. Locals may have cross-bred the American boar with its ill-tempered cousin, the Eurasian wild boar, for hunting. A six hundred pound, sixty mile per hour beast with tusks would be hard to shoot, never ...

Incident reports are commonplace in healthcare, meant to record the facts. But do they? I've written about write-ups, including their presentation as conclusions and use as political bats. If you've worked in healthcare any length of time, you're well aware of the pejorative tone of ''written up.'' It's often an excuse, a threat, and an action ...

We asked CLMA to update us on the status of ThinkLab '08, to be held March 29-April 1 in Atlanta, where a recent tornado did some damage to the Georgia World Congress Center. Here's what they said: ''CLMA is closely monitoring the situation in Atlanta as a result of the tornado that hit the downtown area on Friday, March 14. We are in ...