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Introduction to Clinical Mycology

Part 4



Patient Care

Slide 25

March 2012

In terms of patient care, I think in the laboratory we often have a tendency to forget about this. We are busy doing our own work and we don’t think much about the patient. The patient is not just a number. I think sometimes you really ought to sit there and think about it and say, “What if I was the patient who had this specimen submitted and it was a bronchoscopy, what would happen then?” Well, you be very uncomfortable. So you need to put yourself in the circumstances of the patient sometimes to remind yourself of why we are doing the work. You also need to know that the work needs to be done in a prompt manner. Don’t put it off, because there is a clinician waiting for that result for that patient so that they can start the right therapy or make the right diagnosis. The other thing is that when you are working in a clinical laboratory and you don’t know the answer to something, just go find out. Ask anywhere you can to get the answer. It doesn’t make a difference whether it is someone in-house or if you have to pick up the phone and call them, you pick up the phone and you say, “I need some help with this.” You can call me, you can call whoever it happens to be because the needs of the patient come first. That is the philosophy here at Mayo Clinic and we don’t hesitate to talk to each other or to talk to anyone on the outside when we need to, because we know it is the patient that we are dealing with and it is the patient that is important and not our ego.

Patient Care
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