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 ...

I don't recall hearing much about repetitive motion injury before personal computers. Most of us probably know someone who has suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful condition caused by compressing the median nerve in the wrist, often linked with keyboard use. Symptoms include burning, tingling, or itching in the palm and fingers of the ...

Recently in blood bank we have focused on the purpose of screening tests and how to determine whether or not the test will benefit or harm a specific patient. Before taking this class, I would have assumed giving a patient ABO compatible blood was just fine. However, we have learned quite the opposite. Knowing about frequency of antigens and ...

As students, we are taught about laboratory safety and how to handle situations as they arise. However, you never know how you are going to react in a situation until you're faced with it head-on. It's important to realize blood products could pose a threat to you. Even the slightest cut could expose you to a lot of bacteria and ...

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 ...

If your lab uses a card file to track patient blood bank history, some cards are misfiled. Depending on where in the file they are placed, they may be good as gone. A blood banker won't be able to compare blood types or know that the patient has a positive antibody history. And for your patients, this can be fatal. How many cards are ...

The other day at a meeting about patient identification the subject of redrawing an improperly identified patient for the blood bank came up. One person thought this a terrible idea and said, ''This is all about saving the patient a stick.'' ''Actually,'' I said, ''it's about giving the patient the correct unit of blood.'' When talking about ...

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 ...

According to a recent study by the Center for Studying Health System Change, Americans are increasingly using the Internet to get health information. In 2007, almost 58 percent of the U.S. population--or more than 122 million people--sought health information from sources other than their doctor, as compared to only about 38 percent or ...

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 ...