[Histonet] Re: Histonet Digest, Vol 16, Issue 7

[Mark Adam Tarango]

I started grossing right out of high school.  I was 17, but at least I'd 
already graduated.  I had a few months of standing next to the pathologist
and handing them all the specimen bottles and closing lids, and one day 
the pathologist told me "well you've been watching me gross, why don't you 
just go ahead and do it...call me if you need any help."  That was it, he 
went back into his office, and I just stood there for a few minutes thinking 
of what to do.  After a while I caught on.  I know that if that happened today,
I'd insist i am not qualified to do gross, but i was younger then.  I actually
had a job after that one and all I did was gross.  They should just have an ASCP 
grossing qualification or something.  Then maybe more people would study / learn how 
to gross, and less high school seniors would end up doing it.

Mark Tarango



>Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 08:20:38 -0500
>From: "Fawn Jones" <fjones <@t> namsa.com>
>Subject: [Histonet] Training
>To: <histonet <@t> lists.utsouthwestern.edu>
>Message-ID:
	<915E55B02E236E4D95258B181EEF6317075DC5 <@t> namsams01.namsa.int>
>Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

>I am having a new situation starting to occur, where our company wants
>to hire a high school student to help ship our slides and now they are
>telling us she can gross our tissues also.  We work in a medical device
>testing company where we gross everything from muscles, to spines, to
>all organs from mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, swine, sheep and guinea pigs.
>These are not necessarily easy things to gross as we have to look for
>test articles and implant sites (which may not be visible
>macroscopically), and determine if there are any changes in the tissues.
>I'm not sure we are qualified enough ourselves to be doing these things
>let alone a high school senior.  If anybody could send any information
>on the qualifications needed for this type of work so that we could show
>our managers, (which are not histotechs and have no histology
>experience), that hiring a high school senior to do grossing is not a
>good idea.  We also will not have a pathologist on hand to help with
>grossing of these tissues or for training.  There are no set standards
>for grossing as most of our special studies have different test articles
>and different things they are looking for, so no two of these studies
>are really ever the same.
>Thank you in advance
>Fawn Jones