Dear Colleagues,
I would be very interested to learn about critical values leading to
urgent notification as used by other laboratories.
Specifically, some concerns we are reasoning about:
1. Do we need to establish critical limits for both haemoglobin and
haematocrit which run in parallel in over 99% of all clinical
situations?
2. Does it make sense to set up an upper limit for the platelet count?
3. What about qualitative measures (blasts, immature cells, plasmodia
etc.)?
4. Is it clinically useful to introduce a limit for absolute neutropenia
and if so, at what count (1000/µl or less?)?
5. How do you (clinically meaningful) define pancytopenia?
6. At what levels should delta checks be set in haematology analyzers?
7. Do we need to handle haematology/oncology and/or ICU patients in a
different way (more strictly set limits?)?
I hope that this set of questions will initiate some discussion as I
feel that literature data are at best very limited...
Thank you very much for your input.
Sincerely,
Dr. med. Michael Steiner
University of Rostock
Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Pathobiochemistry
Ernst-Heydemann-Str. 6
D-18057 Rostock
GERMANY
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