Standardizing clinical culture specimen collection in Ethiopia: a training‐of‐trainers

Optimizing specimen collection for processing in clinical testing laboratories

We study the logistics of specimen collection for a clinical testing laboratory that serves sites dispersed in an urban area. The specimens that accumulate at the customer sites throughout the working day are transported to the laboratory for processing. The problem is to construct and schedule a series of tours to collect the accumulated specimens from the sites throughout the day. Two hierarc...

Standardizing data collection in traumatic brain injury.

Collaboration among investigators, centers, countries, and disciplines is essential to advancing the care for traumatic brain injury (TBI). It is thus important that we "speak the same language." Great variability, however, exists in data collection and coding of variables in TBI studies, confounding comparisons between and analysis across different studies. Randomized controlled trials can nev...

Specimen collection for electron microscopy.

were “unknown agents.” For the sake of objectivity, we based our assumption on the aggregate of information for known pathogens rather than on “expert opinion.” Interestingly, however, the Council of Science and Technology’s “expert opinion” of the percentage of diarrheal illness due to foodborne transmission was 35% (1), nearly identical to the figure we developed. As noted in our article, pat...

Urine specimen collection and transport.

is started on a new antibiotic, always take an “antibiotic timeout” and reassess the patient after the first 48 to 72 hours of antimicrobial therapy to assure that the patient has responded to the antimicrobial therapy, as many of the uropathogens are multidrug-resistant. A urinalysis and culture should be collected based on the patient’s symptoms and not solely based on the urine’s characteris...

Specimen collection: an essential tool.