Patient Care

• Residents work with faculty pathologists at WVU engaged in outreach activities to travel to small community hospitals in rural WV (St. Joseph’s Hospital, Minnie Hamilton Health Care Center, Preston Memorial Hospital, Grafton City Hospital). At these locations they engage in laboratory management activities with the respective laboratory managers and interact with the local attending staff in patient care matters
• Discussion of history with clinical house staff and/or attendings.
• Review of laboratory reports of previous pathologic specimens.
• Review of the online medical record when applicable.
• Residents are able to be actively involved with clinical pathology consultations and are able to handle clinical questions with increasing degrees of independence including:
• Researching and reviewing medical information.
• Preparation and interpretation of clinical consults.
• Timely and effective communication with clinicians.
• Residents demonstrate competence in the performance of procedures considered essential for community hospital pathology practices, including:
• Interpretation of peripheral blood smears and body fluids,
• Review of microbiology and virology cultures.
• Review of blood banking results and transfusions.
• Review of abnormal lab results.
• Review of quality assurance and control data.
• Residents make informed decisions regarding further diagnostic workup of patients in a community hospital setting:
• Consider referral to WVU or other reference labs for specialized testing, etc. based on patients’ clinical history, up-to-date scientific evidence gleaned from textbooks, journal articles, internet-based searches, and clinical judgment.
• Expected to be able to handle difficult problems by the time they reach the management rotation.
• Residents use available information technology (hospital and laboratory information systems, internet-based literature searches)
• To support workup and diagnosis of pathology consults.
• To help educate clinicians by providing relevant literature references.
• Residents work with health care providers, in the generation of accurate and clinically useful pathology reports and effective communication of results to clinicians.

Evaluation

• Rotation evaluation
• Presentations to medical technologist and clinical staff at community hospitals..
• 360o Global evaluation