The College of American Pathologists (CAP) inspectors completed their unannounced inspection of Respiratory Therapy and the Cardiac Cath laboratory last week, commenting that they were very well run, very efficient, and the units were well prepared for the inspection.

Respiratory completes more than 15,600 blood gases per year (which has doubled since the move in 2006), and has three new blood gas machines. Two are located in the Critical Care Unit to serve the hospital, and one is located in Respiratory to provide care to outpatients and to the Emergency Department.

Donna Engle, coordinator for the Pulmonary Diagnostic area, has been at SJMC for 23 years. She has an extensive quality assurance program and performance improvement program. She is also in charge of proficiency testing - samples come from the manufacturer with unknown values. Respiratory runs the samples and reports the values to the company. This assures the values they report clinically are valid and reliable.

Respiratory also can run blood samples for coroner cases and test pleural fluids in addition to their normal blood gas volumes.

Clarinda (Rindy) Gerow, RN, is responsible for the Cath Laboratory’s quality assurance program and CAP proficiency testing. The inspectors were particularly impressed with the cath laboratory’s competency program, stating it should become best practice.