Emergency Toxicology Labs Face Many New Challenges

he traditional role of the emergency toxicol-ogy service has been to provide laboratory support to the emergency department for the diagnosis and management of patients sus-pected of a drug overdose. However, the modern clinical toxicology laboratory faces new challenges, including requests for service from other clinical ar-eas, changing drug abuse patterns, and continued constraints on funding of laboratory services. This article focuses on clinical toxicology services sup-porting the emergency department (ED) for sus-pected drug overdoses and discusses several issues related to the provision of this service. Ideally, all the toxicology tests that clinicians need to guide their decision-making would alway