Preface to the first edition

This small volume is intended to provide the essential core knowledge required to assess patients with possible disorders of the blood, organize relevant investigations and initiate therapy where necessary. By reducing extraneous information as much as possible, and presenting key information for each topic, a basic understanding of the pathophysiology is provided and this, we hope, will stimulate readers to follow this up by consulting the larger haematology textbooks.

We have provided both a patient-centred and disease-centred approach to haematological disease, in an attempt to provide a form of ‘surgical sieve’, hopefully enabling doctors in training to formulate a differential diagnosis before consulting the relevant disease-orientated section.

We have provided a full review of haematological investigations and their interpretation, handling emergency situations, and included the commonly used protocols in current use on Haematology Units, hopefully providing a unified approach to patient management.

There are additional sections relating to patient support organizations and Internet resources for further exploration by those wishing to delve deeper into the subject of blood and its diseases.

Obviously with a subject as large as clinical haematology we have been selective about the information we chose to include in the handbook. We would be interested to hear of diseases or situations not covered in this handbook. If there are inaccuracies within the text we accept full responsibility and welcome comments relating to this.

DP

MC

ASD

CRJS

AGS

1998