Jessica Piche, HT(ASCP), presumably at Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, asks:
>>Does anyone know of a good brand/vendor for a balance (with a weighing dish) for the gross room?<< You can get excellent top-loading electronic balances from Ohaus or Mettler or others, for two or three hundred dollars each. These are sold through the standard vendors like whatever Scientific Products is called this week. You must know exactly what you want, and I expect your pathologists to know this. Balance specifications change rapidly as manufacturers improve their products, so that catalog numbers won't help you much. For ordinary gross room use, you want a balance that will weigh in gram increments up to a kilogram or so, so you can weigh 10 grams of prostatic chips or 600 grams of placenta with decent precision and accuracy. For weighing parathyroid specimens, you need to be able to weigh in 10 mg increments, up to a few hundred or thousand milligrams. Weighing parathyroids is standard of care, and if your pathologists and your MBAs don't know it you need to tell them. That's going to take a second balance. (Tip - if your hospital pharmacy still does a little compounding, they may have the right balance. One of my hospitals keeps its old balance around, just for me.) Two caveats you wouldn't think of - unlike the platform balances of yore, electronic balances need replacing fairly often. And druggies will steal your balances to weigh out illegal drugs - in some venues, you have to lock your balances up when you're not using them. _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet