What Is A Medical Laboratory
A medical laboratory is a place where the tests for the clinical specimen will be done in order to get the information needed for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of a disease on a patient. Clinical laboratories are not the same as the research laboratories because they focus on applied science mainly on the production like basis an not on the basic science on an academic basis.
Laboratory medicine usually have two departments on which each unit will be divided into a number of different units. This article will provide you with the two departments below.
Anatomic pathology – this department will include cytopathology, electron microscopy, and histopathology. A person can study each unit in a single course, academically. The other courses related to this section are histology, pathophysiology, pathology, and physiology.
Clinical pathology that includes the following:
Clinical microbiology – this surrounds five different units of science. The units are virology, parasitology, bacteriology, mycology, and immunology.
Clinical chemistry – the units that are under this section are toxicology, endocrinology, enzymology, and the instrumental analysis of blood components.
Hermatology – the manual and automated analysis of the blood cells are the units that are under this section. The blood bank and the coagulation are the other subunits included in this section.
The subspecialty which is the cytogenetics is also studied alongside genetics.
Reproductive biology – assisted reproductive technology, semen analysis, and sperm bank are in this section.
The distribution of clinical laboratories to each health institutions will be different from place to place. An example for this is some facilities might not have a laboratory for microbiology but will have separate labs for each unit, while some health institutions will have one laboratory intended for microbiology.
Below are a detailed analysis on the responsibilities of the laboratory equipments for urinalysis and hermatology.
You should know that any clinical specimen can be received by microbiology like the possible infected tissue, synovial fluids, cerebrospinal fluid, sputum, blood, urine, feces, and swabs. The main task here is focused with cultures, to find out the suspected pathogens that will be further identified with several biochemical tests if found. A pathogen will also undergo a sensitivity test in order to find out if it is resistant or sensitive to a given medicine. The determined organism or organisms and the type and amount of medication that will be prescribed to the patient will be given together with the result.
The types of medical laboratories
In a lot of countries, most of the medical specimens will be processed in two main medical laboratories. The laboratories that are attached to the hospitals will perform different tests for the patients. The samples from health clinics, general practitioners, clinical research sites, and insurance companies will be analyzed in private laboratories. Read more here about medical laboratories in different websites in the internet.