Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: US-FNAB is the most cost/effective and accurate diagnostic procedure for the evaluation of thyroid nodules. In the clinic, the nursing assistance is not always available for the US-FNAB procedure in all endocrinological centers and its value remains to be established.

Aim of the Study: To demonstrate the role of nursing assistance in US-FNAB procedures in improving the efficiency of this procedure.

Methods: All clinical data of the patients were collected and analyzed using the MoCyThy DATABASE, which is the part of the institutional database ENDOBASE (based on the MyQ5L open source technology) devoted to store data of all institutional US-FNABs. Of the 7377 US-FNAB performed at the Unit of Endocrinology of Modena from 2006 to 2009, we compared 4831 US-FNAB performed with nursing assistance with 2546 US-FNAB performed by the same medical team, but without nursing assistance.

Results: The number of US-FNAB performed for every work session (7.57±3.94 vs 6.59±3.03), the number of slides assessed for every work session (77.55±42.93 vs 41.61±31.81), the number of slides prepared for each FNA (10.23±3.2 vs 6.31±2.89) were all significantly higher in the sessions with nursing assistance than in those without nursing assistance (P<0.001 at Mann–Whitney Rank Sum Test).

Conclusions: The support of nursing assistance has a relevant impact on the efficiency of the US-FNAB procedure in terms of the number of US-FNAB performed in each session and of number of slides prepared for each session and for each US-FNAB. In clinical practice, nursing assistance may improve the outcome of US-FNAB procedures and is cost-effective.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research project.

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sector.