26 November 2025 (Wednesday) - Competency Assessments

With pretty much a full house at work with nearly everyone in I was at something of a loose end today, so I took the opportunity to update my competencies. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been gathering specific evidences and toady I wrote up little exercises for performing and reporting

• Blood counts
• Coagulation investigations
• D-Dimer assays
• Fibrinogen assays
• Infectious mononucleosis testing

Back in the day the boss would just blithely announce that someone was competent, or they were not and leave them to it. But today I spent a little while concentrating my mind on some of what it is that I do at work and reviewing it with a colleague.

I found it surprisingly useful…

1 July 2025 (Tuesday) - Competency Assessment

I was asked if I might produce a series of slides for competency assessments. I was rather happy to do so… it’s easier said than done though.

How many slides do we need? I went for twenty, but at five minutes per slide that’s going to take two hours per assessment.

What cases should we cover? What cases have we got in the teaching slides… Has anyone sorted the teaching slides for a while?

Back in the day I compiled a series of teaching slides by sticking what I considered to be an interesting case into a slide tray with a plan to sort it later… and I would forget about it. So consequently when I came to sort the myriad of slides I’d piled up I had a few dozen cases of iron deficient anaemia, a few dozen cases of CLL, and a few dozen slides with frankly horrific looking blast cells. All of which were rather faded.

Fortunately we had quite a variety of cases in the teaching slides. I’ve managed to get eight different slides which are predominantly red cell issues, eight which are predominantly white cell issues, one thrombocytosis, one thrombocytopenia, one with clumps, and one unremarkable one.

Getting a selection was tricky. Now I’ve got to come up with standard (correct) answers…

I quite like making myself useful like this…

3 December 2021 (Friday) - -Parasitology Competency Assessment

I did my parasitology competence review today... I got nine out of ten right.  I missed the P. malariae but the slide in which that parasite was lurking wasn't a good film... in fact it was rather old and the parasites were somewhat squafty (to coin a phrase).

On reviewing that film I saw what I'd missed. I’d not actually missed them; I’d thought they were large mis-shapen and deformed platelets. But this is CPD... I have spotted where I am weak. I need to beef up my awareness of  P. malariae

2 November 2021 (Tuesday) - Competency Review

I spent a few minutes (an hour or so) sitting with the boss yesterday doing a periodic formal review of competency in some aspects of blood transfusion work. For all that we read the SOP and take notice of formal change notices, sometimes it is good to take five minutes and just chat about what we do and how we do it.

7 April 2017 (Friday) - Echo...

Having been spending a little time learning a whole new way to do blood groups and associated investigations, today I was signed off as competent to operate the Immucor Echo. For all that I’ve been doing blood groups (on and off) for coming up to thirty-six years, it never fails to amaze me how the same principle can be put into practice in so many different ways…