[Histonet] Air pocket in paraffin blocks

[Victoria Baker]

Thank you everyone for your responses.  It is very much appreciated.

It is an up hill issue as most of the technical staff have been here and
maybe one other lab in their entire career and "no one's complained
before".  I'd like that phrase and "that's the way we've always done it"
stricken from all languages and any alien dialects we might ever encounter
in our lives.

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

Vikki

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 2:38 PM Mayer,Toysha N via Histonet <
histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu> wrote:

> 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:
> Message-ID:
>         <
> BY2PR13MB06966AAED227C932C3335091967F0 at BY2PR13MB0696.namprd13.prod.outlook.com
> >
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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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