Question: will you research help in the future?

Hayley Pincott answered on 20 Jun 2018:

I don’t carry out research as I work in a NHS pathology lab. I work very closely with researchers from Cardiff Uni who are looking into wound healing, seeing how new materials can be used to help with treatment, also some are looking into biofilms and how natural flora can help in other parts of the body. Pretty amazing stuff. I work in the lab along side some of the researchers so I help them if they have any problems with the practical aspects of their work and can help them troubleshoot. So I don’t do research but I help researchers do their job.

What I do in the lab is when we get a biopsy from the surgeons, doctors or dentists it goes through many processes in the lab with us and we turn it into a slide. The biopsy is described and dissected then processed overnight. The overnight processing removes free water from the biopsy and it goes through solvents so it can be put into wax. We then put the biopsy into a block of wax so we can cut really thin sections (we cut sections at 4microns this is thinner than hair) and the section is put onto a slide. The slide gets put through a staining machine so the nucleus of the cells stains purple and cytoplasm stains pink. This slide then goes out to the pathologists who provide a diagnosis. Every week there is a meeting to discuss patients with other professionals and between everybody the best course of treatment or mangement is decided and can then be discussed with the patient.

So to answer your question my work does help and will do in the future it just doesn’t directly involve research. Hope this answer helps!