NICE JOB missing Cervical Cancer

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The cytotechs are not further compensated for reading more slides. Their incentive is to keep their jobs. I know of cytotechs that have been put on PIP because they were working at levels "comfortable" to them. If anyone or anything is to blame for missed paps, it is corporate greed. There is (or was) corporate documentation of the problems and nothing was done. I hope the plaintiff wins big.
 






Anonymous said:
The cytotechs are not further compensated for reading more slides. Their incentive is to keep their jobs. I know of cytotechs that have been put on PIP because they were working at levels "comfortable" to them. If anyone or anything is to blame for missed paps, it is corporate greed. There is (or was) corporate documentation of the problems and nothing was done. I hope the plaintiff wins big.
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Well soon none of them will have jobs so their misery will be over.

Hologic wont take any blame I bet. There are always clue cells in the fields of view. Of course clue cells are subjective.
 






Anonymous said:
Well hopefully HPV testing will get FDA approval for primary screening and end all of this. If cytotechs wanna keep on screening too many slides causing death and destruction, the field needs to be replaced.
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Listen idiot. HPV testing will never be a primary test so you can get over it and be happy that there is a Pap test. It is not perfect by any means but with the help of ancillary testing, is the best thing going. The biopsy is and will continue to be the gold standard, and it is not perfect either. If you want to know why, read some earlier posts to earlier threads. If the FDA was doing its job, how could labs that use the Imager force cytotechs to screen so many slides? There have been numerous complaints made and still the beat goes on.
 






Anonymous said:
Well soon none of them will have jobs so their misery will be over.

Hologic wont take any blame I bet. There are always clue cells in the fields of view. Of course clue cells are subjective.
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That is not always the case. I cannot count the number of HPV cases and a fair number of High Grade cases that were a total miss by the computer guided Imaging microscope. Some were picked up by the QC review techs while others were picked up incidentally, when scanning for endocervical cells that were not noted in the 22 fields of view. Not a hint of atypia in any field of view.

But I am sure you are right about one thing... Hologic will weasel out of it. They always do.
 






Anonymous said:
That's only if she was asymptomatic. She clearly presented with symptoms which would have justified the annual follow-up pap.

This is a horrible, tragic story.
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And you know this because??? what were the symptoms? Who are you blaming now, the Doctor or the patient who is the victim? The reason that annual paps are necessary is precisely this. The Pap is not perfect. There are a number of reasons why this is so. For instance, collection error. The sample may not represent the lesion. Having yearly Paps increased the odds that the abnormal cells will be found.
 






Anonymous said:
And you know this because??? what were the symptoms? Who are you blaming now, the Doctor or the patient who is the victim? The reason that annual paps are necessary is precisely this. The Pap is not perfect. There are a number of reasons why this is so. For instance, collection error. The sample may not represent the lesion. Having yearly Paps increased the odds that the abnormal cells will be found.
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So an HPV was not ordered?? And this was performed as a single slide not thin prep? I'm confused
 












Anonymous said:
So an HPV was not ordered?? And this was performed as a single slide not thin prep? I'm confused
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At that time, reflex testing was recommended. Reflex testing is when an HPV test is triggered after an atypical Pap. She had 2 false negative Paps. It makes little difference if the Pap was read out negative and the HPV test was positive. The doctor might ask for followup testing to verify results, but it is not unusual to have a false positive HPV test. Do you realize how common it is to get a positive HPV test with a negative Pap? You can have HPV without neoplasia. So far, no one has mentioned if there was an HPV test ever given.
 












Anonymous said:
Listen idiot. HPV testing will never be a primary test so you can get over it and be happy that there is a Pap test. It is not perfect by any means but with the help of ancillary testing, is the best thing going. The biopsy is and will continue to be the gold standard, and it is not perfect either. If you want to know why, read some earlier posts to earlier threads. If the FDA was doing its job, how could labs that use the Imager force cytotechs to screen so many slides? There have been numerous complaints made and still the beat goes on.
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Hey asshole go read the press release on FDA approving HPV for screening.

Know your business!
 






What press release? That isnt official yet. It's for Roche only if it happens.

Put the cytotech that misses cancer in prison I say. Let Big Mamma or Bubba get a hold of them.
 


















Anonymous said:
Even if it means making less money, cytotechnologists need to stop hitting high numbers. Quit rewarding speed. Speed kills.
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I am sure that most cytotechnologists, with the exception of tools like cytotech managers and cytotech Hologic reps, will agree with you. Speed is exceptionally dangerous when dealing with what Labcorp majors in: high risk managed care clients. planned parenthood clinics, etc.
But the jaded side of me know that nothing will change. Greed and intimidation will continue to dominate as AP labs return to the 80's style of sweat shopping.
 
























The key word here is business...When it comes to holding down costs ( nobody who really works gets a real raise) in order to get that bonus, who cares about patients. There is a certain amount of callous indifference in some of the supervision/management. Real passion is wasted on lying, retaliation against perceived adversaries, and settling personal vendettas. If these are the personality traits/types that are preferred and/or chosen to operate a lab, what more should you expect to see?
 






Anonymous said:
The key word here is business...When it comes to holding down costs ( nobody who really works gets a real raise) in order to get that bonus, who cares about patients. There is a certain amount of callous indifference in some of the supervision/management. Real passion is wasted on lying, retaliation against perceived
adversaries, and settling personal vendettas. If these are the personality traits/types that are preferred and/or chosen to operate a lab, what more should you expect to see?
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There are other labs with similar problems. Quality is only an after thought when it comes to turn around time and pushing down costs. Speed not only kills but is error prone. Many of the ThinPreps read there are labeled, but don't have patient names on them. How this passed inspection is a mystery. Techs do not get monthly tissue correlation reports, that is, unless they had false negatives. Heaven help if you mention anything to anyone about stuff like this. You are immediately jacketed as a trouble maker and there will be retaliation. You have to be made an example of. How else will the rest of the troops understand the codes/standards of behavior?

Want a few suggestions? Start encouraging cytotech participation in professional organizations, attending seminars for real continuing education.The occasional CAP tests are good, but are no substitute for lectures with lab sessions from pros who not only read the books but wrote them. There are cases have been missed because the abnormal cells were seen but misdiagnosed. Put people in technical positions who are experienced and skillful. It is suck a waste to underutilize gifted employees. Especially when some insecure opportunist feels threatened by them. To place a person in this type of position because the soulless tool is a mere opportunist who meets the minimum legal requirements to hold the position, shows a deep contempt and disrespect of the profession. It makes the thought of peer review, quite frankly, a joke.
As far as the Image Guided methodology goes, it would be fine if used as an assistant, but as long as it is used as a primary screener, there will continue to be the problems of procedure over content. In the criminal justice system, there is a rule which implies that procedure is more important than truth in the sense that we are only promised "due process." and truth of guilt or innocence is not promised. When one uses the Imaged Guided Scope, one accepts the same principle . To follow the manufacturer's recommendations is to satisfy the lab's standard of care. Hopefully, this will soon change.

There is nothing wrong with color coding cases as stat or priority one. However, priority cases should mean what they say, take priority, and must be read and signed first without the time restriction. This will not cost a cent but will enhance quality.

Become well known for quality test results and not how quickly you can turn out a result.
 






Anonymous said:
So you know the pap was sent to Tampa?

This is on the Labcorp sucks website about Tampa back in 2008. Is it still a mess?

Tampa Fl Employee | 11 Oct 2008 1:26 am
I work in the Tampa fl lab. The place is dirty, disorganized, way to many errors are made. And the only thing our vp Rudy Mendez cares about is turning out work. He screams,yells and swears at employees all day long to get tests resulted now. He doesn’t care if there is a problem with the test a name error on the specimen… he wants the results out now. And because his bonuses are based on not spending the budget, working conditions here are substandard. iF THE DOCTORS DOWN HERE IN Florida saw where their cytology cases were being read they would never send them here. CAP inspectors, our own corporate people from Burlington, NC have called it unacceptable. There is no plan to move us, Rudy gets a bonus for keeping 20+ cytotechs in a leaking portable trailer in the parking lot. Which by the way Rudy’s GOOD friend Mark Doolittle owns the trailer and rents it back to lab corp at a nice profit. Mark is the Guy paid to do all maintaince on Lab Corp. He gets a salary, hires his own companies (his son and one worker) to do work. So he get a salary for being in charge of maintance, then gets paid to sub contract the job to himself, collects rent get paid to maintance the trailer in the parking he is Rudy’s Good friend at the same time for the past 30 years. I would think this would be an ethics issue.

Our specimens are labeled with barcodes, but Rudy didn’t feel we needed barcode readers. So for years we have been trying to read the numbers on the bar car and type them into the computer. Can’t tell you how many errors have been made with that. The lab is in total disrepair. There is one Man Mark Doolittle(should be Mark Do-nothing) in charge of all of Florida labs and service centers. He subs the work to his son and one other guy. Things don’t get down. They need a maintaince team. The same guy Mark Doolittle is also subcontracted to maintain offsite storage of patient information and specimens. I guess he rents storage units all over town, his wife works at them (another ethics issue) Lab corp is stuck with their 1970′s style of doing things, how they got a bad reputation in the first place.

We do not put out quality work…it is substandard. The pathologist reading the cyto / histo report are not competent in cytology…they failed their yearly profiency test. We are not turning out quality work just turning out work quickly. I have worked in two other companies and lab corp is by far the worst. More mistakes are made at lab corp in a week than than are made at quest in a year. Lab corp claims it wants to inprove their quality of work…but they are not open to any suggestion, It’s Rudy’s years of poor quality way or the highway.
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OMG!! This really sucks.Won''t the malpractice insurance cover the law suit? How much is a Pap selling for these days? Penny wise and pound foolish indeed.
 






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