With the increase in clinical examination items, and with the specialization of clinical medicine, physicians' requests for consultations on laboratory medicine is getting more evident. However, at present in many hospitals laboratory staff do not always make appropriate answers to the questions from physicians in various fields because the laboratories are divided in terms of examination fields. In our hospital, we established a consultation division responding to every inquiry from clinical staff with a full-time technologist. At present the division is functioning very well, suggesting that laboratory technologists must build close relations with clinical staff and that the technologist's task is very diverse, not confined to just analyzing samples.

*1Department of Laboratory Medicine, Keio University, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-8582