Reading the Blood Film: The Film Itself

What this deck covers

Reading the Blood Film: The Film Itself in twelve illustrated clinical cases with worked explanations – case presentations built around clinical images, radiology, teaching illustrations and real laboratory data, with the reference range beside every value a case quotes. This visual, data-interpretation style of practice suits candidates preparing for MRCPCH AKP in particular, alongside Saudi and Gulf licensing examinations such as the Arab Board, DHA and OMSB. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong.

The twelve cases, in order

1. Where on the film to look
2. Why the thick end will not do
3. The cells at the trailing edge
4. What the counter cannot tell you
5. Why this film was made at all
6. How much of the film to look at
7. An appearance in every single cell
8. Judging size with nothing to measure
9. What a normal red cell looks like
10. A film that waited on the bench
11. What the report should actually say
12. The lines nobody looked at

What this deck teaches

• Read where the cells stop touching. One layer thick, evenly spread, just short of overlapping. Everything reported about shape and colour comes from that band and nowhere else.
• The thick end and the trailing edge both lie. At the thick end the cells are piled and cannot be judged. At the trailing edge the spreader has dragged them out of shape.
• A counter measures; it does not look. It sizes and counts accurately and it cannot tell you the shape of anything, which is the whole reason a film is made.
• One field is not the film. Several fields across the monolayer, and what is reported is what most of them show.
• Judge size against a small lymphocyte. Its nucleus is about the size of a normal red cell, and it is on the same film under the same lens, which no remembered figure is.
• Central pallor under a third. That is the normal red cell described. More than a third is a finding and none at all is a different one.

Exam pearls from this deck

• One layer thick and just not touching. Everything else is read from there.
• Every appearance at the thick end is thickness until proved otherwise.

The twelve worked cases in this deck, with the images and the full explanation of every option, are part of Pediatric Case Review membership. See what is included, or start with the free Pediatric Exam Review Sets.

More from this system: all haematology illustrated case decks · haematology board questions for bank-style drilling · the free Pediatric Exam Review Sets · pediatric reference values.