Raccomandazioni FISMeLab per il trasporto del materiale biologico

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ABSTRACT

Italian Federation of Laboratory Medicine Societies (FISMeLab) recommendations for biological samples transportation. In recent years the transport of biological samples has become a strategic issue and a frequent practice, due to the tendency of public laboratories to move towards consistent consolidations and of private laboratories to join other, bigger or more equipped ones (hub and spoke model), to process a substantial part of the analytical repertoire. Moreover, the sampling centers have become more numerous and more widespread to improve the service to the citizens. The time and the way of remote transport of biological samples is a source of potential corruption of the matrix that can generates preanalytical errors of various kinds and severity. The lack of unequivocal national indications in Italy has prompted the Italian Federation of Laboratory Medicine Societies (FISMeLab) to set up a working group that includes representatives from the scientific societies members of the Federation, with the aim of assembling a practical recommendation on transport requirements of biological samples. In order to enable the users to consult the document quickly and effectively, the recommendation lists the single measurands from different areas of laboratory medicine and reports for each of them the ideal transportation modalities. These are based on the time elapsed from the blood collection: less or more than three hours; it is however recommended that the time from the blood collection to the transport be as short as possible.

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