Dec 7, 2009 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Canadian scientist steals specimens, caught by U.S. Customs agent at the border
Laboratories are invariably out of the public eye—until there is a problem. In Canada, The Canadian Press reported earlier this year that audits had uncovered serious flaws in the tracking and accountability of dangerous pathogen specimens at federal laboratories. In response, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) called for increased security measures governing bio-safety at government laboratories.
These problems were identified at the nation’s National Microbiology Laboratory, located in Winnipeg. Earlier in the year, this lab played the lead role in testing swine flu (Novel A/H1N1) samples and mapped the progression of this flu strain from Mexico to Canada. Other labs visited and found lacking in full protection of pathogen specimens included the Laboratory for Foodborne Zoonoses in Guelph, Ontario, and federal satellite labs in Alberta and Quebec.
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Dec 1, 2009 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Researchers at UCLA have published the foundation science to use saliva as the specimen for sophisticated diagnostic testing
Someday soon, when your dentist asks you to say “Ah”, he will then collect a saliva specimen and use a chairside point-of-care test (POCT) to screen you for any number of conditions and diseases. This is the goal of a research team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who recently developed what they call the Salivaomics Knowledge Base (SKB). It is a web-based data management system dedicated to help clinicians use saliva as a diagnostic tool.
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Nov 25, 2009 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory Pathology
Highly-automated hospital labs are organized to serve inpatient testing and don’t compete for “outreach” lab business from office-based physicians in the community
DATELINE: AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND—In this nation’s single payer health system, clinical laboratory testing services are allotted to hospital laboratories and commercial laboratories in very specific ways. Consequently, hospital laboratories in New Zealand tend to provide testing primarily for inpatients and for outpatients seen by specialists who practice within the hospital’s facilities.
This is an interesting distinction which sets New Zealand hospital laboratories apart from hospital labs in such countries as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. In each of these countries, it is common for hospital laboratories to provide some laboratory testing to the outpatient and outreach sector, particularly to primary care clinics and office-based specialist physicians.
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Nov 23, 2009 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
News Reports Estimate as many as 25 Million Americans Would STILL Lack Coverage
With its vote on Saturday, the United States Senate advanced its version of a healthcare reform bill one step further. Now, in both the House and Senate, full floor debate will begin on the different healthcare reform bills that have reached the floor in each body.
Looming in the background, however, is the failure of each of these 2,000-page proposed bills to extend universal coverage to all residents of the United States. This is notable fact, since, over the course of 2009, advocates of an immediate legislative overhaul of the healthcare system in the United States declared their goal was to extend health coverage to all of the estimated 46 million Americans who currently lack health coverage.
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Nov 18, 2009 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory Pathology
Increased Test Volumes in Recent Years Trigger an Important Review of Coverage and Funding for Pathology Testing Services
DATELINE: MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—Pathology testing is under the gun in Australia. Fast-rising utilization of pathology testing over the past decade has caught the attention of health system policy makers. They are concerned about the funding and clinical service implications in downstream years should these growth rates in the volume of tests performed continue to increase at comparable rates into the future.
At the same time, a five-year master contract between the Australian national government and a representative group of national pathology and clinical laboratory associations that has brought some predictability in year-to-year spending on pathology testing expired on June 30, 2009. This contract is known as the Pathology Quality and Outlays Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The MOU process was launched in 1989 and continued for 20 years. Since expiring in June, this MOU has not been renewed and the pathology profession in Australia is waiting to learn what new approach may be proposed by government health officials.
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