Pathology

The Department of Clinical and Anatomic Pathology at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children focuses on the special challenges of laboratory diagnosis and monitoring of disease in children. It distinguishes itself from general hospital and commercial laboratories through seven characteristics:

The Department:

Maintains its own pediatric Outpatient Specimen Collection Area (OSCA) staffed by highly trained, experienced pediatric phlebotomists, Monday through Friday, during business hours. OSCA performs specialized pediatric specimen collection of not only blood and urine but also other fluid samples.
Applies analytic techniques that allow sampling the smallest possible specimens from pediatric patients. General hospital laboratories rarely use these techniques because of the increased cost associated with them.
Uses instrumentation in laboratory hematology and clinical chemistry testing that minimizes the impact on results of small amounts of patient specimens.
Provides rapid turnaround of on-site testing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a turnaround time of less than an hour for basic emergency tests performed on-site to support pediatric critical care.
Reports results with age-calibrated childhood reference ranges that reflect studies in age-stratified populations of children more relevant to our pediatric patient population than the ranges provided by commercial laboratories and general hospitals.
Performs rapid antigen testing for common childhood infectious diseases with greater frequency and more rapid reporting than from laboratories in general hospitals and commercial laboratories.
Provides special expertise in the morphological diagnosis of childhood liver disease, cancers, infections, and congenital abnormalities.

The strengths of the department spring from its daily personal interaction with pediatricians and pediatric surgeons who depend upon the results generated by the clinical laboratory and pathologists. Personal contact is an important conduit of performance quality that is rarely available in health care today.

The Department also serves as the Division of Pediatric Pathology for the Department of Pathology of Jefferson Medical College. It enjoys close collaboration with the Jefferson Department on both a professional and a technical level. This collaboration gives us a depth in diagnostic techniques and expertise that our small size would not otherwise permit.

The Departments blood bank has three particular areas of expertise and competence that also reflect the departments focus on pediatric care. First is in autologous blood donation, collecting blood before a surgical operation in order for the patient to receive the collected blood back during or after surgery. This strategy to decrease blood donor exposure was pioneered at duPont in the 1970s for pediatric orthopedic procedures at the Hospital. Second, the blood bank specializes in the support of the special blood needs of the Nemours Cardiac Centers program for correcting congenital heart anomalies in infants and children. Finally, the blood bank prepares the stem cells and bone marrow specimens for the Hospitals Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation Program.

Services Available:

Blood and body fluid tests (including complete blood count, blood coagulation tests, and arterial blood gas determinations from plasma and whole blood, electrolytes, and other chemistries from serum, urine, cerebrospinal, and joint fluid, microbiological cultures and antigen tests from blood and other body fluids for agents of infectious diseases)
Therapeutic drug monitoring
Surgical/anatomic pathology diagnosis
Other special tests performed on histological specimens (such as the demonstration of tissue antigens and genotypic markers)
Blood typing and antibody screening
Autologous blood donation
Blood and bone marrow transplant specimen processing

Typical Diagnoses/Problems: