THE NUCLEUS Issue 2 Spring 2024

CLARE HUGHES

episode 13

Oliver Visram and Joe Shapiro interview Clare Hughes, a clinical scientist in biochemistry working at St George’s Hospital in London.

Clare : We have very good reliability. We do lots of quality control as part of our job. Most of our tests are run on big, automated machines. So, most of the time we don't actually touch the samples at all. Usually, the blood tubes are about 4 millilitres, 5 millilitres, and they go onto a conveyor belt. And the conveyor belt reads the barcode on the sample, sends it to the correct analyser, and runs the test. We have three sets of analysers. And the tests usually use around 50 to 100 microlitres of blood. So, really, tiny volumes. If you think there's 1000 microlitres in 1 millilitre, we're using 50 microlitres, so it's a really, tiny amount. To get a reliable result, we look at both accuracy and precision which are two different things and often get really confused. We do a lot of quality control. Depending on the test, we might run several, what we call internal quality control samples.

Oliver : Clare, thank you very much for coming on to this show with us today. Would you mind giving us a bit of a brief overview of what being a clinical scientist in biochemistry means? Clare : I work in the biochemistry laboratory in the hospital where we process a huge quantity of blood samples for hundreds of different tests. My role specifically is about interpreting those tests and adding lots of comments to them. We can give advice to GPs and hospital staff about how the tests work, what they can be used for, and how to interpret the results. We can often give lots of specific advice that you wouldn't get from just seeing the patient.

Clare : We run about 9,000 samples a day in our biochemistry lab. And the main part of my job is to look at the results of those. Usually, it's the abnormal results that we look at. And tests are often broken into different groups that look at the function of different parts of the body. Our most common tests look at your kidney function, your liver function, and your heart function. And we can tell lots of different things. We might be able to alert doctors to really acute situations. We might be able to say that this patient's got really bad liver function, you need to investigate what might be the cause. Joe : So, 9000 tests, I mean that is a, that's a huge number. And presumably all of these tests are really important. What kind of reliability do you get when you're running all of these?

Joe : A full on job! What's your day like?

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