Clinical Microbiology
Laboratory Purpose:
The North Carolina Baptist Hospital is the teaching hospital affiliated with the Wake Forest School of Medicine. The Clinical Microbiology Laboratory is a fully certified (TJC, CLIA, CAP) laboratory providing full high quality service to the Medical Center and its associated clinics and institutions.
Capabilities:
The laboratory is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and performs over 170,000 cultures and tests a year. Besides routine bacteriological cultures and susceptibility testing, the laboratory also performs cultures/tests for mycobacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses. In addition, a wide variety of serological tests are performed daily.
Because the clinical samples submitted to our laboratory come from very diverse patient populations, our protocols maintain the highest quality standards. To provide efficient medical diagnostic services to our physicians, our laboratory is performing molecular testing for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. The research and development section of the laboratory participates in many antimicrobial susceptibility studies sponsored by various pharmaceutical companies.
The laboratory is also committed to continual quality improvement, incorporating new test and culture technologies as they become available, and constantly re-evaluating its protocols as new pathogens emerge.
Our future effort is directed toward enhancing laboratory technology using assisted analysis of laboratory data that compares pathogen antibiotic susceptibilities to current patient therapy, alerting physicians to potentially ineffective therapy.
More information about antibiotic susceptibility test results is available on the internal network, accessible only on in-house computers connected to the infiNet.