Portfolio Reflection on Internship

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I would like to begin by saying I have been a Laboratory technician for over ten years now and have worked at my current job for over three years. I began my internship with the feeling that I would not have anything to write or say about the experience but I was wrong. I started out with the blood bank department. I work my weekends in that department, we are assigned a department for weekend rotations. My supervisor is also the blood bank department supervisor. I came to the Houston Medical Center with little blood bank experience and will leave there with a very good understanding of blood bank. I had never performed a patient type and screen with the GEL technology before. I love using GEL. I find that the sensitivity is so much better than your old tube testing. I started out with the blood types, we use a special repeater pipette that can expel multiple samples. First you take the ABO RH card label it and pull the cover off the top. You then pipette your back type a and b cell 50ul each into the appropriate section. Next I add 25ul of patient plasma and add that to the back type a and b cell. To make the cell suspension you take 25ul of patient cells and add one dispense of the 2 plus diluent mix well and pipette 12.5up into the A, B, D, and D control sections of the GEL card. At this point you are ready to spin the card in the special GEL card centrifuge for 10 minutes. I found the type to take longer this way but when you are doing multiple types and screens it helps and things get done in a timely manner. To perform a screen with the GEL cards you need an IgG GEL card and the screen calls. First you label your card with screen cell I, II , and III then takes 50ul of each screen cell and add it to the appropriate section...

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... really do not need not to mention the larger bill they are accumulating in the process.
The coagulation department is included in the hematology department. I really like the Stago instruments we have. They are very easy to use and instrument maintenance is minimal and easily performed. The quality control and specimen testing are straightforward. The specimens need to be filled to the fill line or they will be rejected, the ratio needs to be accurate for an accurate result. D-dimers are the only test we run that is affected by hemolysis so if the specimen is hemolysed we need to have it recollected. I did discover that if a specimen had a clot the PTT result would be elevated maybe even >249 PT results will be affected also with a lower than normal result. We should be checking all specimens before we spin them for clots and have them recollected if one is found.

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