| Summary: | To improve the quality of learning and training for laboratory science students at UAMS, the Hematology Academic Laboratory needs new peripheral blood smears. Teaching slide sets display deteriorated cells and faded stain overtime. This interferes with the students acquiring skills for proper normal and abnormal cell identification and differentiation required as part of learning objectives of the laboratory science curriculum. A senior student project was implemented as a time and cost-effective method to renew sets of slides. Senior laboratory science students built complete sets of new blood smears from patient specimens obtained from their clinical internship site. The project required the students to review disease history, to understand key characteristics of cells and morphology changes, use proper technique to make, stain and preserve slides, and perform cell counts on slides to be included in the set. Standardization of slides in the set took into account student, trainer and automated cell counts. Five senior students participated in the project and produced on average 30 slides each for leukemia cases (AML, CML, CLL and MM) and 39 slides from a newborn, 19 of which are reticulocyte slides. Feedback from a post-experience survey indicated overall student project satisfaction, resulting in gaining valuable experience and reinforcing clinical skills. All participants agreed that this student project was very helpful and should be offered by the Laboratory Science Program every year.
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