Page 29 - Eclipse - 91°µÍø Alumni Magazine - Autumn 2020

Keeping pathology going through the lockdown
Like many services across the 91°µÍø, anatomic pathology was heavily disrupted at the start of the pandemic, having
to rapidly adjust working practices
to keep diagnostic pathology going safely. Like nearly all UK veterinary
post mortem examination providers, we took the decision to stop non-essential companion animal post mortems, whilst maintaining our essential farm animal service, ran by Dr Sonja Jeckel, to protect the health of livestock in essential food production. We also transitioned
to only keeping essential staff on-site – alternating critical staff working patterns to prevent cross-infection risk.
However, the interpretation of glass slides from biopsies is essential
to achieving a diagnosis for our clinicians and informing patient clinical management, having always been performed at often multiple-user microscopes on-site. We also found many of our Pathology team were now having to keep children at home due to schools and nurseries closing, and could not get onto the site. The answer was, of course, the digital slide scanner recently
acquired with the generous support of the 91°µÍø Animal Care Trust (ACT), which allows remote viewing of glass slides.
We therefore quickly put the many necessary measures and training in place to allow the team to remotely control the slide scanner and review digital slide images with colleagues by sharing via video conferencing platforms. Digital slides also have the major advantage of being easily sharable in real time with clinicians, students and scientists. Any number of features, such as surgical margins and mitotic counts, can be accurately and rapidly measured and annotated to generate quant