Urine Specimens

Urine is an essential specimen for clinical investigation. Single urine specimens may be enough for biochemical investigation base on the type of test requested. Just like other sample, containers for urine collections must be clean, dry, grease free, leak proof, should have sufficient wide mouth and free from any contamination, either chemical or biological for the patient to use.

Urine collections can be either in the morning after waking up from bed(early morning urine), timed, or random.

1. Early morning urine specimens; it as urine collected early morning after waking up from bed. First voided urine on waking up in the morning is called early morning urine specimen. These early morning urine often contain high numbers of substance, compere to other urine sample collected later in the day. Therefore early morning urine is suitable for easy detection of any abnormalities.

2. Timed specimens of urine; As the name implies, it urine sample collected times to time. On these type of sample collection, a patients will be told at what specific time that he/she should bring sample, that is time interval, it can either be after 2 hours or after 3 hours it depend on the type of investigation requested.

Sometimes, it may be compulsory to collect a timed specimens urine for some quantitative investigation of certain substance, such as; hormone, calcium, steroids, phosphate, and protein. The reason of these type of sample for these investigation is that the concentration of these substance different from urine sample to urine sample, so pooled specimens on a long period of times mostly 24hours yield more reliable results.

The laboratory personal should guide the patient on the proper way of collecting timed specimen urine. A completed 24 hours urine collection is as follows;

a. The patient be instructed yo empty his/her bladder and make sure to take note of the time. For example 08.00 hours. These urine is discarded and not regarded as part of collection.

b. Provide the patient with 2 litre of containers capacity, mostly with perfect stabilizer or preservatives.

c. Other the patient to collect all the urine passed within next 24 hours into the containers, up to and the urine passed at 08.00 hours next following day.

Note “precautions should be adhere to during deification in other not to contaminate the urine with faecal. If with any excuse collection time cannot be completed, make sure to take note of the last collections. In some case collection over 24hour is need.”

1. Random urine specimens: often random urine sample is collected for chemical analysis when quantitative estimations is not required. Random urine sample is collected for detection of the presences of e.g., glucose, protein, specific gravity’s, leukocytes, urobilinogen, bilirubin’s, and many more.

Preservation of urine