[Histonet] Air pocket in paraffin blocks

[deGuzman, Jose R]

Hello Vikki,

What you are experiencing is the lack of quality feedback. The "experienced" techs may have never been told that their quality needs to improve due to complacency or management is afraid they might leave. This gets worse if they have gotten away with producing poor quality for a long time and nobody has provided much needed feedback to them. You may have an uphill battle ahead of you but very much worth taking.

Jose

-----Original Message-----
From: Victoria Baker <bakevictoria at gmail.com> 
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2019 5:49 PM
To: histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu
Subject: [Histonet] Air pocket in paraffin blocks

Hi,

When I was trained to do embedding there were many things that the professor stressed to me need to be done in order to have the tissue block acceptable for sectioning.  One of these was air bubbles.

Recently we had a new tech embed a derm block that had an bubble that was pretty big.  The other (experienced) techs didn't think anything of it either and sectioned it.  When I got the block for IHC screening I made a QA form stating that the block should have been re-embedded before giving it to be sectioned, or when the first tech sectioned it could have repaired the block or melted it down.  This air bubble was big enough to be seen so I don't think it could have been missed - unless the block wasn't checked right after embedding.

What has me a little upset is that no one seemed to care about this.

I would really appreciate some feedback about this from other people.

Thanks in advance.

Vikki