Is it acceptable to use a microscope in the office and not in the laboratory? I often see microscopes inside the office rooms of professors as well as other teaching members. They may not use them on daily basis but once in a while, or sometimes heavily used by a few of them. Some of them examine hospital slides received by that department from patients sputa to look for hazardous organisms (e.g. TB bacilli).

My question, according to the quality assurance standards of teaching laboratories, and from the safety point of view, is it acceptable to use microscopes inside offices instead of laboratory rooms? Is it acceptable to use them inside the office while wearing the casual clothes instead of the lab coat, and without gloves?
I see three main potential issues in the use of a microscope informally in an office, rather than in a laboratory environment:


Safety: some samples might be potentially hazardous to a person handling them without laboratory protections.
Sample damage: some samples may be vulnerable to contamination or damage through exposure to an office environment.
Ethics: information on a patient or student subject may be exposed through informal handling of a sample.


If all three of these can be dealt with (e.g., through proper sample preparation and reasonable precautions against exposure of adverse information), then I see no reason that a microscope cannot be used in an informal office environment. I am not familiar with precautions around the particular samples you mention in your post, but many fixatives used with specimens are extremely effective and might well render samples quite inert.