By Beaker, Your Lab Training Partner
Hi there! Beaker here again, your lab’s best friend! I want to alert you to some great APHL webinars coming up this month. Some of the courses are free! And the webinars are a really good deal because everyone in your lab can attend for around $150 (some are less), everyone gets to listen in on the day of the webinar, and everyone gets CEUs. Even people who aren’t there on the day of the live webinar can login after the broadcast to participate and earn CEUs. What a bargain! Look at the bottom of the page to see the pre-recorded webinars—same great deal!
Fall is in the air, and my friends at APHL want to remind you to get your flu shot this year! A great website and app is Flu Near You. If you haven’t downloaded it or seen it, you should — they list all the places where you can find a flu shot, and you can help track the latest flu outbreaks.
Have you been wondering how this year’s flu season will stack up against others from a lab perspective? Do you want to know what types of flu are circulating or are expected to circulate? Although you missed our October 1st webinar update on flu, you can still register your lab for the archived webinar, 2013 Influenza Update, facilitated by Dr. Pete Shult and Dr. Julie Villanueva. Dr. Shult, commonly known as the “guru of flu,” is an expert in virology and can tell you anything you want to know about influenza. He is the director of the Communicable Disease Division and Emergency Lab Response Communicable Disease Division at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene. Dr. Villanueva is with the Virus Surveillance and Diagnostics Branch, Influenza Division at CDC. They also discuss the novel strains of flu circulating – all those Hs and Ns confuse everyone! This archived webinar will help you understand them.
After your lab attends the October 1st Flu Update webinar, check your Flu IQ with the flu IQ widget from the CDC website and pass it along to your friends and family.
Attention all clinical labs – On October 10th, APHL is co-sponsoring a webinar with ASCLS entitled Challenging Cases in Hematology with Kathleen Finnegan, from Stony Brook University in New York. This should be a fascinating journey through challenging hematology case studies focusing on diagnostic criteria in characterizing leukemias, myelodysplastic disorders and myeloproliferative neoplasms. Also, on October 24th, APHL is partnering with ASM for Changes in LRN Sentinel Lab Protocols. The speaker is Dr. Jim Snyder from the University of Louisville who will summarize the NEW revisions to the microbiology protocols and tell you how to meet the responsibility of “rule out or refer.” Two must-attend webinars for your labs!
Another exciting series of webinars coming up in October is the gastroenteritis series on October 8th, 15th and 22nd. Your lab can register for all three and save $60! The first in the series deals with processing, culture and handling of bacteria that cause gastroenteritis, like Salmonella, Shigella, STEC, Campylobacter and Clostridium difficile. The speaker for this first webinar is Romney Humphries, PhD, D(ABMM) who is from the UCLA School of Medicine. The second in the series goes through antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of those bacteria which is sometimes concerning given the threat of resistance. You will get some great pointers on reporting of AST and ways to structure pathogen antibiogram reports by our well-known speaker, Janet Hindler, MCLS, MT(ASCP) from UCLS Healthcare System. She is definitely an expert and you will come away with lots of knowledge, I can assure you! The last webinar is called, “Management of Patients with Bacterial Gastroenteritis” and this is the one you should invite your infection control team and infectious disease doctors to participate in with you! The speaker is Dr. Joshua Fierer who is Professor of Medicine and Pathology, UC San Diego School of Medicine and Chief of Infectious Diseases for the VA San Diego.
That’s it for now. Be sure to email me if you want any more info or just want to talk! Remember, I am your lab’s best friend!
