Re: Work per hour detailed profile

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From:Jeff Silverman <peptolab@hamptons.com> (by way of histonet)
To:histonet <histonet@magicnet.net>
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The folks from South Africa must be talking about two techs at once.  I'm a
lone tech and embed 70-80 blocks per hour. We use beauty salon permanent
papers (Perfect Papers) to wrap biopsies and they are easy to fold
uniformly for quick unwrapping. At age 45, I cut 40-50 ( or even 55  if
there' s lots of hernias, veins, tubes, and abortions!) blocks per hour,
placing two levels on the same slide for most routine endoscopic and
bladder biopsies, those scanty, mucoid uterine curettings and small skin
lesions.  I try to anticipiate which cases will travel and thus need
separate level slides. Prostate, liver, and breast core biopsies always get
one level per slide but all those endo's on single slides saves a lot of
work. This saves coverslipping, labelling, and archiving time and space and
we almost never need the separate levels. We do a Diff Kwik on all gastric
and Alcian blue hematoxylin on all esophageal biospies on a separate slide.
I cut decal bone marrow cores and lymph nodes at 2 microns and everything
else at three (uterus, cervix cones, colon, tumors) to five (fat, hernias)
depending on my mood. I use low profile blades (Tissue Tek) on a Leitz 1412
(I think, the upright gray one with the coarse feed in front).  I've had
occasional mild pain in either hand and one scary one month bout of sharp
pain in the left (coarse feed twisting) wrist.

Jeff Silverman
peptolab@hamptons.com
----------
> From: connie mcmanus <conmac@cc.usu.edu>
> To: HistoNet@pathology.swmed.edu
> Subject: Re: Work per hour
> Date: Friday, October 02, 1998 4:19 PM
>
> >TO:  A. G. DuToit:
> >Having just read the report from South Africa, I was glad I was sitting
> >down.  Are you really talking about trimming blocks, cutting, labeling
> >slides, etc. for 100 + slides an hour?  I want to see the smoke coming
from
> >the microtomes and how many fingers to the techs have on each hand?
Would
> >you please expound on your technic?  And how thick are you cutting the
> >tissue?
> >Cheryl Crowder
>
>
> Yeah,me too!!  100 blocks per HOUR????  sheesh!
> Connie M.
>




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