Objective:

The reporting of critical values is considered a necessary practice in clinical pathology laboratories since immediate communication determines therapeutic decisions that can save lives. The choice of critical values and the way they are reported must be a joint decision between laboratory specialists and clinical professionals from each health facility since they must be integrated into the dynamics of the services involved. Among the critical values that have been chosen for this review, we have included quantitative parameters, whose processing is carried out in automated hematology analyzers, and morphological ndings in peripheral blood smears, which trained professionals evaluate.

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