#52: Aspirate, or just jiggle? (And other sampling questions answered.) With Dr Rebekah Liffman.

There are many things you do almost every day in your job as a clinical veterinarian, usually multiple times a day. Sometimes these things become so routine that you don’t even stop to think about what you do and how you do it, and whether there could potentially be better ways that will deliver better results. And you DEFINITELY never get around to asking the questions you’ve always wondered about.

Routine pathology sampling is high on this list. How do we ensure that we get good quality FNA smears that have the best chances of being diagnostic? Should you pull back on the plunger when you sample or just wiggle the needle around in there?  What can and can’t you FNA? (Did you know that you can get great results from FNA’ing bone pathology?!) What about blood sampling? Surely we can’t mess that up, can we?! And CSF? That’s just for the specialist centres, right? Maybe not. 

Our guest for this episode is Dr Rebekah Liffman. Rebekah is a clinical pathologist at ASAP laboratories in Victoria (http://www.asaplab.com.au/Home.aspx), which is one of the labs that make up the SVS Pathology Network. If you listened to our previous pathology episode with Dr Flaminia Coiacetto you’d know that YOUR  favourite local lab is probably also part of the SVS pathology network: Vetpath in western Australia and the NT, QML if you’re a  Queenslander, Vetnostics in New South Wales and the ACT,  TML in Tasmania, and ASAP laboratory in Victoria and South Australia. A big thank you to SVS for supplying us with the brains for this episode and for supporting this series of episodes.  

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