Adequacy of clinical information supplied by clinicians for histopathologic diagnosis: The university of Benin teaching hospital experince

Abstract

Background: The volume of workload in histopathology laboratories need to be accurately measured so that resources can be used appropriately in a challenging clinical environment. Aims: The main objective of this work is to assess the adequacy of clinical information provided by clinicians requesting for histopathological investigations. Materials and Methods: A total of 1659 sequential histopathological request forms sent to Department of Histopathology of the University of Benin Teaching Hospital between January 1, and December 31, 2005, were retrospectively studied and analyzed. The provision of data by surgeons and physicians were compared in a Microsoft Excel 2000 Spreadsheet using the Chi-square test with Yates's correction where appropriate. Given the number of variables being assessed, a Bonferonni correction was applied, and a value of P = 0.001 was therefore considered the limit of significance. Results: A total of 1659 pathology request cards were audited in this study. Of these, 1382 cases accounting for 83.3% were a request made by surgeons while 277 constituting 16.7% were a request sent by physicians. Hence, the ratio of a request made by surgeons and physicians were 5:1. Among the request made by surgeons, the most common request was from the Surgery Department accounting for 783 (47.2%) of all requests. Among the 277 requests made by physicians, the department of internal medicine had the highest volume accounting for 122 (7.35%) of all cases. A total of 1415 out of 1659 were found to be inadequately completed accounting for 85.3%. There were significant differences in the information on ethnicity, date, time and clinical summary recorded by surgeons and physicians and the P < 0.001, respectively. Conclusion: Majority of the pathology request cards sent by clinicians are inadequately completed with an extremely high preanalytic phase errors.