Aotea News April 2012

Editorial -- talking about communication

Welcome to the first edition of Aotea News for 2012. We plan to bring you three editions this year, as well as two editions of our new publication Aotea Clinical Update, which has a focus on longer clinical and medical articles. Read more here.

Critical values now on our website

Quickly and accurately communicating patients’ critical test results is a core task for our laboratory team. Read more here.

Lipid test results: stars are coming back

Stars are to be put back on our lipid reports, to help bring the results to your attention for follow up -- either in calculating risk or monitoring treatment. Read more here.

Good details on request forms make all the difference

Complete and accurate details on request forms allow us to get your results back to you more quickly and with greater accuracy. Here are tips on good practice for completing a request form if you do not have access to eLab. Read more here.

Faecal occult blood: how to get the best from the test

For your patient to get an accurate test, and for our laboratory to be as effective as possible, please give the following pre-test advice to your patient. Read more here.

Ethnicity required for cervical smears

Please capture ethnicity information from cervical smear patients -- it is very important for improving the  National Cervical Screening Programme. Read more here.

Top tips for using eLab

eLab is our new online tool that lets you enter test requests straight into our system. We have now installed it at more than half of our referring practitioners. To help you get the most out of the system, here are five useful tips. Read more here.

D Dimer testing moves to new machine

Changes to molecular hepatitis send-away testing

From mid-April 2012, we will refer test requests for molecular hepatitis tests to the Capital & Coast DHB laboratory at Wellington Hospital.. Read more here.

Download the newsletter in PDF

Download the PDF of April's newsletter here.