[Histonet] negative IHC controls

[Horn, Hazel V]

Not only should you be running a negative control for each patient slide.
That negative control should be treated just as your antibody is.   If the
antibody is rabbit and antigen retrieved, so should your control.   If
another antibody on the same patient is mouse and not retrieved another
negative control should be run with this same protocol.   In the United
States, labs that are inspected by the CAP, are required to run these
controls.    MONEY should never be considered as a reason to stop doing a
part of a procedure.   It's poor patient care and lousy quality control.
IMHO.
 
Hazel Horn, HT/HTL (ASCP)
Histology Supervisor
Arkansas Children's Hospital

Phone - 501.364.4240
Fax - 501.364.3912 

-----Original Message-----
From: vermast [mailto:vermast <@t> rogers.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 3:57 PM
To: histonet <@t> lists.utsouthwestern.edu
Subject: [Histonet] negative IHC controls


 
I would like to get a feel for how many out there are running negative
control slides for IHC.  
 
In our lab we do just a handful of antibodies and initially I had been
running a negative control slide with each patient slide.   After much
discussion with our pathologists, we decided to omit these negatives (which
were conistently negative) and continue to just run a positive control with
each primary antibody for the run.  We use the Dako autostainer and
prediluted primaries.  The decision to stop running negatives also coincided
with Dako's decision to sell the negative control sera separately from the
primaries (they used to come packaged together).  Perhaps I assumed that
discontinuing to pair these reagents together meant that few labs were using
the negatives.
 
Anyhow, after having reviewed the last QMPLS (Canada) survey committee
comments, I believe the committe would like a negative control run with each
patient tissue slide in order to evaluate background  (they have used NCCLS
guide pages as reference).  Incidentally we weren't a part of the survey due
to a technicality.
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
 
L. Vermast
Stratford, Ont.



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