4.4 Laboratory and clinician communication

Helping individual physicians to select and interpret diagnostic tests on the appropriate clinical specimens is the major goal of diagnostic stewardship, and good communication between the laboratory and the clinicians is important in achieving this. Similarly, clinicians can help laboratories to process samples optimally by providing relevant patient clinical data and clinician contact details on the request form. The laboratory should inform the clinician when they can expect to receive the result, and should notify the clinician with the result, explaining its interpretation (if needed) and ideally being available by phone to answer any questions (Dik et al., 2017).

One important role of good communication practice is – perhaps ironically – identifying situations where under-reporting the presence of pathogens might prevent the over-use of precious antibiotics. In a commentary surtitled ‘less is more’, Buchan (2024) sets out cases where certain potentially pathogenic bacteria are being or can be left out of laboratory reports to reduce antibiotic prescription with a low risk of patient harm: for example, withholding urine culture results from patients who don’t meet the clinical criteria for UTIs. Alternatively, reports may be annotated to indicate that the risk from a pathogen is minimal, using wording such as ‘This organism is frequently associated with contamination due to normal skin colonisation’.