The course is designed mainly for senior undergraduates of our Department. Microbiology and Clinical Bacteriology and Mycology are pre-requisites for this course. The four- credit course is given three to four times each year. For each round, students will practice in the Division of Clinical Bacteriology and Mycology laboratories, Department of Laboratory Medicine, NTUH, from Tuesday to Friday (8:30 to 17:00) for four weeks.
The course is aimed to help students to understand the overall process and the routine practices in the clinical bacterial laboratory; and is part of the training for a medical technologist. Students will learn the interpretation of smears for bacteria, specimen inoculation, bacterial identification by conventional methods or automated systems, blood culture, anaerobic culture, antimicrobial susceptibility testing, mycobacterial culture, and fungal cultures etc. In the third and fourth weeks, each student will give an oral presentation about one recent paper in related field and participate in a panel discussion. At the end of the practice, students will perform an unknown specimen culture, do the isolation and identification, and present a report.