Hi Kimberly, A H&E control slide should be run prior to any patient slides. Much easier to fix issues before staining hundreds of patient slides. We create H&E control blocks with small portions of appendix, skin, placenta, and liver embedded in one block. A technologist reads the slide daily and records quality of nuclear and cytoplasmic staining as well as the the lot number of both the hematoxylin and eosin. These results are recorded electronically in our QA LIS. Should we encounter any issues with the control slide, changes are made, and another control slide is run before any patient slides are stained. While multiple control slide runs do not happen very often, it is still much better to do that rather than correcting multiple sets of patient slides. The slides are dated and if more than one is required, numbered with the appropriate number. We keep our control slides each in a slide file card for the week to refer to if we want to check any changes that may be occuring. After that the control slides are moved to cardboard slide boxes to be retained under our Canadian retention guidelines. The slide boxes are dated with a date range of contents. Hope this is of help to you. Karen J Kay, MLT Pathology Supervisor Chinook Health Laboratory Chinook Regional Hospital Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Message: 16 Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:07:23 -0800 From: "Jodie Robertson" <jrobert...@pathologysciences.com> Subject: RE: [Histonet] Daily H&E Control To: "Marshall, Kimberly" <kimberly.marsh...@ahss.org>, <histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu> Message-ID: <518cd6920aa7154193cbe5977cd88073177...@psmgsrv2.psmg.local> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" You should have a daily H&E control that is run BEFORE any patient slides are. There can always be a situation arise (i.e. baskets put in the wrong place) that can affect the staining outcome. It's much easier to correct on a control than have to either de-stain and re-stain or recut patient tissue. We used to use the patient's slides as controls until we got the system better. We use skin, placenta, tonsil, appendix and uterus as a control that we place in one block. This gives us a broad range of stain quality. We grade the slide for quality as HT's and record it for our paperwork. If it passes for us, we stain the patient slides. The pathologist gets the control slide as well and signs off on his paperwork before reading the slides received. Jodie Robertson, HT(ASCP) QIHC Pathology Sciences Medical Group Chico, CA 95926 -----Original Message----- From: histonet-boun...@lists.utsouthwestern.edu [mailto:histonet-boun...@lists.utsouthwestern.edu] On Behalf Of Marshall, Kimberly Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 7:30 AM To: histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu Subject: [Histonet] Daily H&E Control Howdy fellow Histo Techs, I am hoping to get an answer from everyone regarding C.A.P. and the rules about a daily H&E control. This year will be the first one for our lab with CAP, I want to know if there is a regulation about having a daily H&E control to view and if so what tissue do they want used. Up till now each day I give my Pathologist a QC sheet to fill out and I make any changes the next day if there are any problems. My pathologist use the daily slides as a control. Is this enough or do I need to have record of a control separate from my daily workload? Thanks in advance for you help. Kimberly Marshall H.T. (ASCP) This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to which it is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal and or privileged information. Please contact us immediately if you are not the intended recipient. Do not copy, distribute or take action relying on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed. _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet