[Histonet] Air pocket in paraffin blocks

[Mayer,Toysha N]

Vikki,

I teach students that they should not have any air bubbles in their blocks.  This means those under the lip of the cassette as well as surrounding the tissues.  Air bubbles can cause instability in the block especially if the tissue is hard or very small.  When they go to a clinical rotation no preceptor checks their blocks as closely as I do, but they can get a 'perfect' block without much effort.  Our tissues and cassettes have mostly been donated, so the quality may not be as optimal as that in a clinical lab, so if they can get a good block embedded with me, they can do it anywhere.
It is actually a scored item on our graded checklist, along with the overall embedded time.  
You might want to do an in-service on air bubbles and give them a CEU for it.  

Hope this helps.

Toysha N. Mayer D.H.Sc., MBA, HT(ASCP)
Assistant Professor/Associate Program Director
HTL Program
MD Anderson School of Health Professions
713.563.3481
tnmayer at mdanderson.org



Message: 1
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2019 18:32:41 +0000
From: "deGuzman, Jose R" <Jose.R.deGuzman at gunet.georgetown.edu>
To: Victoria Baker <bakevictoria at gmail.com>,
	"histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu"
	<histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu>
Subject: 
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	<BY2PR13MB06966AAED227C932C3335091967F0 at BY2PR13MB0696.namprd13.prod.outlook.com>
	
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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


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