When one of my colleagues was asked for thyroid function tests
out of hours I turned to my local endocrinologist for a considered view.
To cut a very reassuring conversion short he stated:
1. TFTs are very rarely required out of hours and never overnight.
2. In the case of, say, a 4 day bank holiday the only
clinically justifiable situation where TFTs may be helpful would be
in a case of thyroid storm in which the clinical diagnosis was in doubt.
3. In such cases he agreed that the test could only be requested
after the patient had been seen by himself or another senior
member of the endocrine medical team.
4. In that unusual situation we would do everything we could to
get the tests done (much easier now we are running them on
a random access immunoassay analyser).
This department accepted this advice without demur and I have
had occasion to restate this policy twice, also adding the assurance that we
will make every effort to get a result through quickly on the next working day.
"Sorted" as they say on East-Enders.
James Falconer Smith
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