JCarpenter

Hi All, I am just wondering what you all are doing about the Blue Top Coag tube shortage. We have gone to fingerstick protimes but that doesn't cover all our coag testing.

I have also thought this is odd. So I use a urine control since we are only assessing if the techs can count and fill a chamber properly. We do have our QC set up so that each tech counting must do QC it is not just once per shift. If the same tech is doing another body fluid they do not have to run QC again but if it is a different tech then they must do their own QC.

We too have a DxH600 it took a while but we did validate the instrument for body fluids. The higher counts correlated better than the low counts. Is there someone you can get samples from close by? We basically manually count all clear samples as they do not correlate. Our linearity is for body fluids is 10-66,000 for WBC and 150-5M for RBCs so CSF really cannot be done on the instrument unless it is cloudy.

Did you talk to your analyst or technical support because I was thinking that the software in the instrument now does that for you.

We used to preform these but we now we get to send them out as part of a panel. We had a separate order so that when we did the differential we could count the bronchial epithelial cells with the WBCs. We did a 100 cell differential on a cytocentrifuged slide.

Hi Guys, We are looking at purchasing an IRIS iRICELL2000 from BeckmanCoulter or a CLINITEK AUWi PRO from Siemens. Any thoughts out there about which would be better for a smaller lab. We currently have an old IRIS that I do like but it does not do well with bacteria. For those who might have the AUWi how often do you need to go to the microscope? Thanks for your help

We are in the process of choosing new Coag. analyzers and have narrowed it down to IL and Siemens. I was hoping to get opinions on the liquid protime reagent for the Top 350s that IL says is available. Also how is their Heparin Xa reagent. We have a CA1500 now and would change to the CA2500 but I have been having some QC issues lately but my instrument is only 12 years old.

Hi All, I would like to change our CSF differential to be preformed only when the WBC count is greater than 5. Right now we do differentials on all samples no matter what the WBC count is. I cannot find any documentation in the literature that this is ok. I know of a few hospitals that do this. If you do this what reference to you use to for documentation in your procedure. Do you also report a comment as to why the differential was not done? Thanks for your help.

At our hospital we have to call all heparin protocol aPTTs critical or not. Our critical aPTT is based on our heparin protocol curve.