Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
'Looking at everything' was a common term in daily talk about screening.
The cytodiagnosticians above also talked about 'checking' everything, or
'looking through' the whole material. However, screening did not mean
looking at one cell at a time. Rather, screening meant looking at several cells
at once, in a fi eld of vision and for a short amount of time. One such fi eld of
vision could contain hundreds of cells, as described by Filippa at Cyto lab:
In each fi eld of vision you see maybe a hundred, two hundred, three
hundred cells or maybe more. But you must be able to see all of them,
get an overview and scan the picture with between a hundred to three
hundred cells, maybe more. I don't know, I have never counted them
- in just a fraction of a second, you know. A tenth or a hundredth
of a second, I don't know. Assess and scan all the cells at once. You
could never go through every fi eld one by one. That's why it's called
'screening', to screen the cells.
The speed with which the cytodiagnosticians performed screening was
said to be highly individual and not possible to increase or reduce on demand.
Several informants also said that screening cytology actually
demanded
a
certain speed. Hanna, one of the cytodiagnosticians at City lab, described
screening as 'a rhythm' she came into:
You da, da, da, da and then back and forth. It can't be too slow because
then you think that everything looks strange. Then you sit and fi ddle
around and look and fi nd loads of strange cells that aren't really there.
You work just as fast even though you don't have much to do.
Thus, even if Hanna had few samples to screen she did not reduce her
screening speed, as this did not improve screening. Sarah, a cytodiagnostician
at Cyto lab, talked about screening in terms of a 'smooth fl ow':
… when you sit down, then you get a second wind with screening. It
fl ows better after a while.
Every screener had to learn her or his personal screening speed, as it was
considered to be highly individual. Also, the speed was not the same for
all samples, but varied, as some samples took longer to screen. Although
screening speed was commonly acknowledged as something that could not be
increased by force or on demand, and was seldom talked about in normative
terms, screening speed was not unimportant in either of the labs. For
example, both labs had standards for how quickly they would deliver sample
notifi cation to the health care facilities (called 'reporting time'). At Cyto lab,
fast screeners were appreciated in the sense that they were able to 'really get
through work'. The cytodiagnosticians felt some (varied) degree of pressure
to keep reporting time during periods of heavy workload. They could not,
