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Health care officials ponder solutions to medical lab technologist shortage

The shortage of medical laboratory technologists in the Northwest and other areas got some attention in the province's latest healthcare plan, and local hospital leaders have additional ideas about what's needed.

Georgia Carr has been drawn to medical laboratories for decades.

The manager of laboratory services at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre is one of the voices with ideas to address the shortage of medical laboratory technologists in the Northwest, which will only get worse in the coming years with looming retirements.

Carr’s perspective comes from a career path that’s taken her up the ranks within healthcare starting with housekeeping at the now-closed McKellar Hospital in Thunder Bay.

“Just having started out as a housekeeper, you learn a lot about the inner workings in a hospital,” she said. “I cleaned the lab and got to know the lab people and the [Thunder Bay Institute of Medical Technology] was over at Paterson Hall.” 

This interest lead to Carr enrolling in the program, she said, adding there were lots of jobs in the field when she graduated as a medical laboratory technologist in 1987.

However, by 1996, the institute closed due to saturation in the market and with it went a ready supply of medical technologists from the region, she said.

“We've been sounding the alarm bells for years saying that we're in trouble,” she said, pointing to survey data that show programs need to graduate at least 250 more technologists per year to keep up with a silver tsunami of retirements. 

Carr said of the 12 people in lab management, “eight of us are [at the] age of retirement right now. Many of us are staying out of the kindness in our hearts.”

“Between the front line worker retirements and my lab management team retirements, there's not enough of people coming up the pipe, period,” she said.

The sentiment was echoed by Ray Racette, CEO of the Lake of the Woods District Hospital in Kenora.

“There's no question that we need to increase the number of training spaces if we're ever going to have any hope of surviving the retirement rate, which the clock has started,” he said. “If we see nothing changing, we know it's going to happen with lab because it's fully predictable.”

Racette said there needs to be creative ways of bringing in more students into the profession, perhaps with new ways of learning like incorporating virtual and on-site learning.

“From the hospital side, we need to gather up the ability to host more students, more placements because if we don't do that, we shoot ourselves in the foot,” he said. “We're going to need to find a way to get the capacity to train [technologists].”

He also said having enough staff for the future is important, with many students not knowing about the different careers in health care.

“We need to actually start talking to high school students over careers because you can build a tremendous career within those areas [like diagnostic imaging and clinical laboratory] as you can with nursing and medicine,” he said.

Michelle Hoad, the CEO of the Medical Laboratories Professionals’ Association of Ontario, said part of her organization's strategic plan is to promote the profession to create the next generation of laboratory technologists. 

“We're hoping by promoting the profession, there will be more people within those smaller communities that will say, 'yeah, rather than be a nurse, maybe I'll look into the med lab science programs,” she said. "We've got to somehow figure out how can we home grow these people so that they grow up in a Northern community, go to school and stay there.” 

Carr said she thinks students need to be approached even earlier, in grades 7 or 8, to get them to start thinking about it as a career. Another program in Thunder Bay is needed, she added.

“There's no school in the region and a lot of the kids can't afford to go away or leave home. A lot of my med lab assistants would certainly leave their job and go to a medical technology school but they can't afford to just go away,” Carr said. “The key point is we need students from Thunder Bay and the region to be accepted into the program because that's the people who stay and work here.” 

Hoad said there is no lack of interest in becoming a medical laboratory technologist, with all five provincial programs having waiting lists. The closest program to the Northwest is at Cambrian College in Sudbury.

Hoad, Carr and Racette are among many who have been trying to raise the issue for years. Hoad is pleased the calls for action have finally caught the ear of the province.

On Thursday, Minister of Health Sylvia Jones presented a comprehensive health care plan that included creating more spaces for medical lab technologist students, as well as a pledge to work on establishing bridging programs that would allow existing health care workers, like laboratory technicians, to upgrade their skills to become technologists, without needing to take the whole program.

And last month, the province also introduced the expansion of the Learn and Stay program to include medical laboratory technologist students, which would provide students from rural and other underserved areas grants to cover tuition and books in exchange for working in these areas.

“It is truly the first time in a long time that we're starting to see movement and investment in lab outside of the larger areas, GTA, Hamilton, London,[etc.] We're starting to really see things. When you start to hear from patients that their results are taking longer than normal that is concerning, and I think the government has really started to hear a lot of that input,“ she said.

“The MLPAO’s extremely happy with the inclusion of medical lab professionals in the long-term approach of addressing our healthcare problems.”

Confederation College also noted the need for medical laboratory technologists and said it’s working with Cambrian College to see how they might meet the demand across the Northwest.

“We’re going to be pursuing a number of different partnerships with other colleges to be able to see what is possible,” said Shane Strickland, dean of the college's school of health. “We don’t have any plans to make announcements right away, but we do plan in the next little while to be able to come back to community and make announcements around partnerships.”

Hoad said she’s still waiting on details for all these programs and noted that they will help with future needs, but not with immediate ones.

It’s about recognizing the moment, Racette said, adding people should not underestimate lab professionals and their resourcefulness.

“They're very talented and they can evolve and adjust, and we're going to really need to be nimble and flexible and all of that as we go through these demographic challenges that we're going to face,” he said.

Racette recounted the situation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lab took on the massive task of testing without any additional staffing and everything was strained.

“Carrying that for two years on top of the additional workload, it was an unbelievable achievement that's not recognized publicly,” he said.

In the meantime, Carr said she’s been planning strategically for what’s to come with support from the Thunder Bay hospital by upgrading systems and investing in technologies that can free up laboratory technologists to allow them to work more efficiently.

“Getting all the capital equipment replaced, getting all the lab modernization done, automating every single place that we could, which meant interfaces, software, [etc.]. It meant anything that I could get that could free up a precious medical laboratory technologist's hands from having to manually do something, not the diagnosis, not the interpretation, everything leading up to that,” she said.

“I tried to do everything I can when I can because you never know what tomorrow is going to bring.”




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