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5 articles
Home blood-pressure monitors, glucose meters and pulse oximeters increasingly produce numbers that disagree with clinic measurements. This article sets out a plain-English approach to validation, calibration drift, technique and traceability, and offers a clinician-facing framework for separating noise from device error and genuine clinical signal.
A routine blood test is often described as a single event, yet it is a sequence of handoffs, checks and queues. This article maps the journey from GP surgery to laboratory report in 2026, showing where delays, rejections and interpretation gaps can emerge and what clinicians and patients can reasonably ask.
A laboratory assay can be analytically sound and still make a poor home-testing pathway. This article sets out why local validation matters for at-home blood, saliva and urine kits in the UK, and offers a plain-English checklist for clinicians, commissioners and consumers.
Rapid tests in nursing homes could keep frail residents out of hospital and speed treatment. The barriers are less about the technology than about training, funding and governance.
A blood result is a measurement under conditions, not a verdict, and the conditions matter most when the number looks normal. This practical listicle sets out five interpretive traps — haemolysis, fasting status, reference-range drift, incidental findings and repeat-testing thresholds — with consultation scripts for explaining uncertainty without undermining useful testing.