Ultrasound guided thyroid FNA is a commonly performed procedure in radiology departments in the workup of patients with thyroid nodules. Prior to COVID-19 my experience in public teaching hospitals was that the pathologist attended the procedure to collect the sample, prepare the slides and confirm adequacy of sample. Since COVID-19 I observed across multiple hospitals that this practice changed and pathologists were no longer attending these procedures, as such I decided to conduct a quality control audit at my current hospital to assess if this...

Approval was obtained from the NALHN clinical governance committee to perform a de-identified quality control audit into thyroid FNA in the radiology department at LMH. We collected de-identified patient data on all thyroid FNA’s performed at the LMH radiology department over a 7 month period between September 2020 and March 2021. The data collected included: nodule dimensions, maximum diameter, TIRADS classification (if reported), needle gauge (if recorded), number of passes (if recorded), Bethesda category, diagnostic (yes or no), FNA indicated based on TIRADS score and...

126 thyroid FNA’s were performed in the period from September 2020 to March 2021. 73 (58%) were diagnostic defined as Bethesda category 2-6 and 53 (42%) were non-diagnostic defined as Bethesda category 1. The only factor with a clear trend impacting diagnostic rate observed in this audit was the level of experience of the performing clinician with consultants having a diagnostic rate of 65% (43 procedures), registrars having a diagnostic rate of 57% (54 procedures) and resident medical officers having a diagnostic rate of 48%...

Thyroid nodules are very common with up to 68% of adults reported to have a thyroid nodule (Guth et al 2009). FNA can be used to assess if these nodules are benign or malignant and guide further management if required. Thyroid carcinoma is also common but not always clinically important and so choosing the correct patient to perform FNA is important, a previous systematic autopsy study found that 36% of 101 thyroid glands had occult papillary cancer (Harach HR et al 1985). The main criteria...

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