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.
There are two departments when it comes to laboratory medicine and each department will be subdivided into different units. These two departments are listed below.
Anatomic pathology – this department will include cytopathology, electron microscopy, and histopathology. Academically, each of the units can be studied alone in a single course. 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 surrounds five different units of science. Mycology, immunology, bacteriology, parasitology, and virology are the units included here!
Clinical chemistry: the units included in this section are enzymology, endocrinology, toxicology, and the instrumental analysis of blood components.
Hermatology – the manual and automated analysis of blood cells are under this section. The blood bank and the coagulation are the other subunits included in this section.
Cytogenetics is a subspecialty that is 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.
Learn more about the detailed analysis of the role of each laboratory equipment for hermatology and urinalysis below.
Microbiology will receive almost any kind of clinical specimen like feces, blood, swabs, sputum, snynovial fluid, possible infected tissues, urine and cerebrospinal fluid. That main task here involves the main concern with cultures, looking for the possible pathogens that will be identified more based on 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.
Different types of medical laboratories
There are two main types of medical laboratories that will process most of the medical specimens in a lot of countries. The laboratories that are attached to the hospitals will perform different tests for the patients. Private laboratories will analyze the samples from insurance companies, clinical research sites, health clinics, and general practitioners. You can look into a website if you want to know more about medical laboratories.