[Histonet] increase in staples and sutures

[Davis, Cassie]

RE: increase in staples and sutures 
Ken,
       this really depends on the amount of support you get from your Medical Director. Any staple or sutures are removed at grossing by the PA or embedding or microtomy by the histology technician still affects the tissue. Either way the pathologist hasn't typically seen the tissue or slide yet. This is a fight that seems to go on everywhere that does larger specimens. We record it at microtomy as a quality issue of grossing if there is a staple or suture in the block just for documentation purposes. 
      The only way there can be can justification for the tech removing it is the PA time and blade that get ruined cost more than the HT that is embedding or doing microtomy. I'm not sure why it is not taken into consideration the PA's time and blade is already on the specimen in order to gross it so why should both budgets suffer. I wish you well on this fight, please share if you make good progress.

Cassie Davis


Message: 2
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:10:48 +0000
From: "Metzger, Kenneth" <kenneth.metzger at aruplab.com>
To: "histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu"
        <histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu>
Subject: [Histonet] Staples and Sutures
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        <3855827CD3E36249A30D57F6F896F8F10229ADC336 at EXMBX2.aruplab.net>
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Hello All,

Recently we have had a marked increase in staples and sutures in our tissue that arrives for processing. I have tried to relay to our pathologists and PA's the difficulty in cutting sections and the tissue destruction in getting staples and sutures out once the tissue is processed to paraffin. I was told by some of them that in their experience histology should dealing with this issue. Though my own opinion is this is position is not valid, I've been asked to collect opinions from other histology departments if there are protocols that the grossing individual should be removing the foreign object. Please give me any feedback...Thanks

Ken

Kenneth G Metzger HTL(ASCP)
Histology Supervisor
ARUP Labs
Salt Lake City, Utah
Phone: (801)583-2787 ext. 3101
Fax: (801) 584-5244
Email: kenneth.metzger at aruplab.com<mailto:kenneth.metzger at aruplab.com>

 

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