Abstract
This essay is based on the Professor Hendrik Koornhof's guest address
delivered on 1st September 2011 by Professor Jill Murray at
the Laboratory Medicine Congress held at the Sandton Convention
Centre. Following the address, Professor Hendrik Koornhof
was awarded a life-time achievement award in honour of his
contribution to laboratory medicine.
All health care professionals should keep abreast of the latest
developments in their fields. The continuing quest for new
knowledge is conducted through research. Many laboratory
technologists make valuable contributions to research, however,
most of the time their role is that of assistants to other health
care professionals and scientists. Too few medical technologists
conduct their own investigations. The absence of studies in routine
laboratory practice implies a tacit assumption that current
practice will not change and is therefore boring!
Reasons given for not doing research include lack of time and
lack of resources. There is also the problem of which area of
laboratory medicine to study and being familiar enough with
the subject to develop good research questions. Research is perceived
as time consuming, requiring a lot of funding and specialist
knowledge. By looking carefully at the resources within
one’s own laboratory, the requirements for time and money can
be minimised and you will be able to utilise your knowledge in
your own area of expertise.
As part of the routine service, which is an integral part of patient
care, all laboratories produce and retain large amounts of
data. Collecting, organizing and studying this data can increase
medical knowledge. Researching routinely collected data minimises
the time and costs associated with data collection. In addition
the data is in an area of medicine in which the laboratory has experience and expertise. Because of the expert knowledge
available in the laboratory there will be an understanding of
what is known and what is not; a prerequisite for the formulation
of research questions and hypotheses. This paper will look
at the type of data available to laboratories; how to report and
display this data and the type of research questions that routinely
collected data can answer.