Enhanced training for those who collect specimens for COVID-19 testing can help increase the accuracy of diagnostic results, according to a new study led by SFU health sciences PhD student Natalie Kinloch.
Kinloch, a Vanier scholar and research assistant at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, worked with health sciences professor Zabrina Brumme and UBC professor Christopher Lowe, to compare two groups of nasopharyngeal swabs submitted for COVID-19 testing in BC. They examined 40 swabs from presumed or confirmed COVID-19 cases that had yielded false negative test results, along with a control group of 87 swabs submitted to the same lab for testing.
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The researchers’ suggestion that augmented training for health care professionals could help improve testing accuracy is already having real-world impact. For instance, Providence Health Care recently created a training video on proper swab collection.
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