Cameron Penney
Although patients don’t always realize it, the laboratory at La Verendrye General Hospital here plays a key role in their well-being and recovery from illness.
This week, the local hospital is celebrating National Medical Laboratory Week in recognition of the work it does.
“A lot of what doctors’ decisions are based on is the testing that we do in the lab,” noted lab manager Toni Benning.
“And lots of people don’t know what we do or that we are even here.
“We are kind of forgotten about down in the basement,” Benning added.
“You go to [the emergency room] and they come and draw your blood,” she remarked.
“But after that, no one really knows what happens.”
Benning feels it’s important to promote what the lab does to raise awareness and generate interest in their field of work.
“It’s not often known what we do,” she said. “Often people don’t realize that there is a whole profession out there.
“We have a hard time recruiting [lab technologists],” Benning added.
“So just by getting it out there the kinds of things we do and maybe get some people interested—and people from Fort Frances, because often we end up hiring people from southern Ontario or other places and they don’t often stay.
“We’re starting to get to a crunch where people are retiring, and then they come back and work casual just to help us out,” she explained.
Most of the staff are medical laboratory technologists. They conduct tests and provided data to physicians, which allows them to determine a proper diagnosis and treatment.
To become a technologist, a student must complete a three-year college program, which involves two years of course work and then an eight-month placement.
“We are affiliated with Cambrian College in Sudbury and we have taken students over the years,” Benning said.
“We try to recruit them so that’s helped us with getting staff, but it’s becoming harder and harder to recruit,” she stressed.
“If we can promote ourselves and say what a great place to work and what a great profession it is to be in—it’s a very rewarding career—[then] maybe we will get more people interested in it,” she reasoned.
Along with the technologists, there also is one medical laboratory technician on staff.
“That person, it’s a one-year college course,” Benning said.
“They learn how to draw blood, they learn how to do some things, but they can’t report out any results,” she noted.
“They can put samples onto the analyzers but they can’t report out because they aren’t technologists.”
Most of the staff work during the day while one works a shift at night. And after 9 p.m., a technologist is on-call in case of an emergency.
“If somebody comes to [the emergency room] and they’re having a heart attack, then they call us to come,” Benning explained.
“We have to come right away and do the blood work,” she noted.
“We’re a pretty big part of what goes on.”
Using the various machines in the lab, technologists here are able to perform tests in chemistry, microbiology, and hematology, as well as transfusion science.
For example, white blood cells will be prepared on a slide. Then using a microscope, a technologist could differentiate and diagnose leukemia.
There also are computers and analyzers that conduct various tests, and a technologist reviews the information provided.
“If there’s something abnormal, they repeat it just to make sure and then they release it,” Benning noted.
“As soon as they release it, it’s available in the system for the doctor to see,” she added.
“So the doctor, wherever [they are], can go on a computer and see it.”
To ensure the machines are producing accurate results, samples with already-identified materials (known as “quality control”) run through them each morning.
“There are ranges that the results have to be in,” Benning said. “We’re making sure everything is good every single day on every single piece of equipment that we have before we report out patients’ results.
“We have to know that it’s working,” she stressed.
If the correct results are not produced, the samples are run a second time. If the problem persists, an algorithm then can help identify potential problems and solutions.
There also are smaller, back-up machines to ensure the lab can continue to provide data for patients.
A recent addition to the lab here is a new blood bank that is stored with blood samples provided by Canadian Blood Services.
“They do all kinds of testing on it before they send it to us,” Benning explained.
“We would combine some of this with the patient’s serum and make sure it doesn’t have a reaction—because you don’t want a reaction to happen inside a person’s body,” she noted.
While the lab here is not large in scale, it does play a big role in treating local patients.
“Because we’re a small town, we don’t have a big volume of work,” Benning conceded.
“But you still have to be able to give answers when someone comes to [the emergency room] and they don’t know what’s wrong with them,” she reasoned.
“If they’re having abdominal pain or chest pain, you can help to diagnose or rule out an illness.”
