Did You Know That There Are Different Blood Specialty Labs?

Grouping of Blood Bank Laboratory Departments

 Different conditions and diseases require different types of screening methods. Therefore, most modern laboratories, especially in hospital, have different departments to focus on a special area. These labs are vastly automated, using centrifuges, analyzers, incubators and computer programs.

One thing that's known to always confuse people is the grouping of different hospital laboratory departments. Not everybody who hears the word lab immediately associates them with different specialties, such as chemistry, anatomy, pathology, let alone serology and microbiology.

Clinical Lab

Clinical laboratory technologists evaluate test results, develop and modify procedures, and establish and monitor programs, to ensure the accuracy of tests. Some technologists supervise clinical laboratory technicians. This is where medical technologists focus on processing cultures of all types to help diagnose disease. Depending on the type of culture, a tiny sample of a collected specimen is planted on special growth media and incubated for a certain amount of time. Virology, fungal, acid-fast bacteria (mycobacteria) require special processing procedures.

Clinical lab special areas are:

• Toxicology
• Microbiology:
• • virology
  • mycology
  • bacteriology
  • parasitology
    
• Molecular
• Urinalysis 
   

Hematology

Chemistry Lab:

These focus mostly on blood work. Minute samples of blood are preserved and screened using fully automated chemistry lab analyzers.

Blood bank:

This is where blood is "typed", crossmatched and stored for transfusions.

Pathology

Histology Lab:

Here is where all surgery biopsies go for gross and microscopic examination. Gross examination is performed by a pathologist assisted by a histology technician who tracks, measures, mounts, stains and cuts, the specimens for the pathologist to read. Some of these body tissues can be quite large. Everything what they see, including the size and appearance, is carefully recorded.

Cytology Lab:

This is where cytologists look at healthy and abnormal cells, e.g. from PAP smears; also spinal, pleural, ascetic and abdominal fluids, as well as sputum are examined and analyzed here. If it is found that abnormal cells are present the slides are reexamined by a pathologist to finalize and confirm the readings.