Where do you go for help, when you are a parent of a child who stops breathing while it sleeps? If you live in the south of Sweden, you go to Halmstad County Hospital, where a team of specialists are ready to monitor your sleeping child by polysomnography (PSG). The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in Halmstad has ...

Mock inspections are a great way to prepare for real-life inspections from regulatory agencies such as CAP and JCAHO. But where do you start? And most importantly, what should you look for? Lou Ann Wyer, Clinical Specialist, POCT at the Virginia-based Sentara Laboratory Services and Theresa Kulik, Point-of-care...

Hospital do Coração (HCor) in São Paolo, Brazil is a hospital for cardiac patients, many of whom are children and newborns. Cardiac patients are closely monitored with respect to acid base and blood gases, and even the newborns have several arterial and venous blood samples drawn daily. Dr Alberto Duarte from the...

The National Kidney Disease Education Program (NKDEP) Laboratory Working Group reviewed problems related to serum creatinine measurement for estimating glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and prepared recommendations to standardize and improve creatinine measurement. The NKDEP recommends using the estimating equation...

Clinical initiatives to maintain blood glucose (BG) within a more normal range have emerged over the last decade as a growing trend in clinical management of patients in acute care settings. This trend has grown due to the increased focus of research in glycemic control (GC) and results indicating that GC is...

Reprinted with permission from Elsevier from "Neonate capillary blood gas reference values", by Jocelyne Cousineau, Suzanne Anctil, Ana Carceller, Monique Gonthier and Edgard E. Delvin, CLINICAL BIOCHEMISTRY, Vol no 38, 2005, pp 905-907. Copyright 2005 by Canadian Society of Clinical Chemists. OBJECTIVES Because...

Iatrogenic phlebotomy loss resulting from the intensive clinical monitoring in the weeks immediately following birth remains the primary cause of neonatal anemia and the need for red-blood-cell (RBC) transfusion. Reducing RBC transfusion needs in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) requires new approaches for...

Blood gases are measured from an arterial blood sample to evaluate the respiratory adequacy and oxygen status of the critically ill patient. For the adult patient, the arterial blood is sampled either by arterial puncture or from an indwelling catheter. In neonates and children, the wish to minimize iatrogenic blood...

As point-of-care testing (POCT) becomes more popular in healthcare institutions because of its ability to deliver high-quality results at the bedside, point-of-care coordinators (POCCs) are becoming increasingly tasked with controlling costs. To deal with this responsibility, POCCs often turn to equipment to solve...

Lately, everybody seems to be talking about reducing testing errors and improving patient safety. But where do you begin? The answer may be to look beyond the error itself and instead focus on what is causing it. Michael Astion, Associate Professor, Director of the University of Washington’s Reference Laboratory...