Departamentos de Anatomía Patológica a tenor de la legislación vigente

Specimen management in a Anatomic Pathology department in Spain is directly affected by the Data Protection Act, the Patient Autonomy Law and the Biomedical Research Law. These laws affect transcendental aspects, such as how long samples must be kept (minimum 30 years), and enforce that an Ethics Committee must oversee the use of these samples in research, that these must come with informed consent, that they must be fully traceable, that they must be registered in biobank databases, etc. These and other aspects that invariably influence specimen management in Anatomic Pathology services are analysed in this article.