Laboratory medicine: a guide for foundation doctors

摘要

As increasing pressure is placed on the medical school curriculum, many foundation doctors will begin their first jobs with little or no formal training in the disciplines making up pathology. However, a large part of the work done by foundation doctors involves organizing and interpreting diagnostic tests and using their results in the clinical context to trigger further investigations or treatment. A large proportion of illnesses treated in hospital require some form of laboratory diagnostics and it is often easy to overlook the knowledge resource the laboratories offer, in addition to simply producing results. This short article reviews the facilities available to foundation doctors from the laboratory medicine disciplines found in the majority of hospitals - notably clinical biochemistry, haematology, immunology and microbiology. Additional more specialized services such as neonatal screening and genetics tend to be more centralized on a regional or sub-regional basis, and are not included here, although the same principles described below do apply. Similarly, the work of the cellular pathologist - histopathologist-cytologist-forensic pathologist and post-mortem related work are examined separately.