I have used a Pathology reporting service at Sheffield, the Dental hospital for over 20 years.
For dentists this is a really easy system to use, if you phone up they will send you the pot, the bags, the forms and everything that you need. You can send your specimens directly and a Pathologist will report this in Sheffield. It’s a wonderful service and has always worked extremely well; I have never known a problem associated with this.
For private practices there is a small charge (around £90) that can be passed directly onto the patient and stop them having to go for routine biopsies or other things like fibro-epithelial polyps. Recently though it seems that they have started to work more closely with the Department of Histopathology at the Sheffield teaching hospitals. This is not a problem, but the reporting forms now return as white pieces of paper where as previously they had been yellow forms which I had written my diagnosis on and the report was printed on the back.
I have no doubt it is cheaper and more efficient to produce them the way they are done now but the big difference is this.
The forms were previously bright yellow and they stood out like a sore thumb, so when the paper work came back into the practice you could see it. The forms are now white with black ink and look like every other piece of paper that comes through.
While I understand efficiency and there must be a significant cost reason why this has been done, it distracts from the ‘importance’ and the ‘branding’ of the Histopathology form. While this does not seem to be a problem and if every body seems to work diligently then the forms will be reported, filed and actioned on in the correct manner, there is just the situation here of a Pathology form being missed, filed wrong or lost. This was unlikely to happen if the forms were yellow. What this demonstrates to me is that changing a system for efficiency does not always make the systems better; it usually just makes the system cheaper.
Very politely I wrote to the guys at Sheffield to say thank you for the 20 years of excellent service and suggested that they might consider the prospect of printing these reports on yellow paper to keep the consistency and continuity, but we will see what happens. It did make me think about our own practice and how we change things and whether it actually makes things better or just makes it different, worse or more efficient.
Blog Post Number - 1362
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