What Is A Medical Laboratory
A medical laboratory or also known as a clinical laboratory is a laboratory where the tests for the clinical specimens will took place in order to get the information on the health of a patient. Clinical laboratories focus on applied science mainly on the production-like basis not like the research laboratories that focus on 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. You can read more about the two departments below.
Anatomic pathology – electron microscopy, histopathology, and cytopathology are the units included in this department. A person can study each unit in a single course, academically. Physiology, pathology, pathophysiology, and histology are the other courses that you can get from this department.
Clinical pathology that contains the following:
Clinical microbiology – this course surrounds five various units of science. The units are virology, parasitology, bacteriology, mycology, and immunology.
Clinical chemistry – the instrumental analysis of blood components, endocrinology, toxicology, and enzymology, are the units that are included in this section.
Hermatology – the manual and automated analysis of the blood cells are the units that are under this section. The two subunits in this section are the blood bank and coagulation.
Genetics is studied also alongside a subspecialty which is the cytogenetics.
Reproductive biology – you can find the assisted reproductive technology, semen analysis, and sperm bank in this section.
The distribution of the clinical laboratories in different health institutions will differ from different places. An example for this is that some health institutions will have one lab intended for microbiology while some will not have a lab for microbiology but will have different labs for each unit.
You can find a detailed analysis on the responsibilities of the laboratory equipment for urinalysis and hermatology in this website.
Microbiology will receive almost any kind of clinical specimen like feces, blood, swabs, sputum, snynovial fluid, possible infected tissues, urine and cerebrospinal fluid. 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 sensitivity test will also be done in order to know if the pathogen is resistant or sensitive to a prescribed medicine, simply check this company. The results will be reported with the determined organism or organisms, and the type and number of drugs that will be given to the patient.
Different types of medical laboratories
In a lot of countries, there are two main types of medical laboratories that will process most of the medical specimens. 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. You can look into a website if you want to know more about medical laboratories.
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