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I'm looking for some advice. I've recently took over managing an Medical Examiner's office after spending my last 20 yrs in the clinical laboratory. We are experiencing wash off of hand written labeling of our histology cassettes. We send our cassettes out to another laboratory to produce the slides and the labeling is washing off during this process. We have tried all the vendors recommendations by using special pens and #2 pencil but still experience wash off. I figure a simple solution would to purchase a histology cassette printer and would be other than the huge price tag associated with these items. The ones I have viewed are in the range $10,000-$20,000 and this is too much for the volume we perform. I'm limited in my knowledge in this area but I would think there would be cheaper alternatives to these printers. Any help appreciate.

There is some debate within our lab on how manual cell count qc should be performed. According to JACHO, qc should be performed in duplicate every 8 hrs per individual tech. The debate comes in, when the patient requires a manual diff on the cell count. Some interpret the regs as that we should perform qc on the cell count and qc of the diff portion, others interpret it as performing qc and documenting the cell count only. Wanting to know what everyone else interprets it as, and what you do in your labs. Thanks

Looking to get some feedback on how the smaller labs perform daily review of blood bank testing. We recently got cited during an JACHO inspection for not performing a daily review of blood bank testing, we were reviewing the testing on a weekly basis. Our problem is that we are a small lab, usually one tech working per shift, and I was the one responsible for reviewing the work from the previous week and another tech was reviewing the other week. Since I perform most of the blood bank testing and really should not be reviewing my own work, my dilemma is perfoming the daily review with such short staffing. Any ideas or insight would be helpful.