From: Kim Donadio <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Histonet] Basis for Quality Work in a Histotech
To: "O'Donnell, Bill" <[email protected]>,        Maria Mejia
        <[email protected]>,   "Morken, Timothy"
        <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]"
        <[email protected]>
Message-ID:
        <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Kim Donadio (where?) comments:
>>I'd like to add my two cents to the measuring "Quality" topic. I'll make it 
>>short. - You should have a "Quality Management" program. It's vital to track 
>>errors, types of errors, frequency and who etc. This is NOT a tool for blame 
>>as we are all adults or we should be. It is however a tool for tracking 
>>trends, making improvements and yes if you did see someone making a mistake 
>>often, you would have the data to educate particular personnel. - There are 
>>QM tools out there from various organizations. And yes, there are standards 
>>of deviations such as the TAT for frozens. There are standards for other 
>>things as well. Set Standards of excellence with your Pathologist. Make 
>>goals. Track them. Follow improvement.<<

I'm going to add a sour and cynical rejoinder. As most of you know,
I'm an elderly pathologist who's spent the last 30 years as a locum
tenens, working maybe 60 pathology services in my "career". Sometimes
in a pathology practice I'll be asked to fill out daily "quality
whatever" (the patter changes with the years) reports about the
slides. I always dread having to do this, because I know that the more
of this paperwork I have to do, the worse the slides will be. The
worst was one that required several square inches of scribbling a day.
They couldn't mount a coverslip correctly.

Any meaningful system would require daily feedback from pathologist
(or other end user) to histotechnologist. I've never encountered a
pathology service that accomplished this.

Dang - now I'm remembering that this morning duodenal biopsy sections
were the best I'd ever seen here, and I forgot to tell the histotech
before she slipped out the door!

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Maryville TN

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