06Jun

This is National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, a time to mark the vital contribution of those who work behind the scenes.

This is National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, a time to mark the vital contribution of those who work behind the scenes.

We at Green Key Resources say THANK YOU to all the technicians, scientists and pathologists who fill such an important role in the current coronavirus crisis. You are the professionals analyzing patient samples to provide the critical clues for diagnosing and treating the COVID-19 disease.

Medical Laboratory Professional Week takes on a special significance this year, because of the critical work these healthcare workers are doing to fight the pandemic. While the rest of us maintain social distance, laboratory professionals handle the specimens from the sick and those who may be. They are the ones who analyze the test swabs and the blood samples.

They may not ever meet a patient, but they are as much a part of the frontline as the nurses and doctors and others who do.

Year round, their work informs doctors, nurses and researchers about the illness of their patients, confirming initial diagnoses or prompting the treatment team to reassess when the results differ.

All of these professionals have specialized training. Pathologists are physicians, sometimes called a “doctor’s doctor,” who analyze biopsies and the more complex analytical tests, particularly in difficult situations. Medical laboratory scientists, technologists and clinical laboratory scientists may perform many of the routine tests in a lab, but are most often involved in specialized testing and quality control. Many are specialists in a specific area such as hematology, cytogenetics, microbiology and immunology.

In most labs, it is the technicians who conduct the routine tests. They do most of the detective work, consulting with pathologists and laboratory scientists in unusual cases or complicated testing.

So think of these laboratory professionals this week and tweet your thanks with the #LabWeek tag.

Green Key Resources is grateful to all of the people working hard to fight this pandemic.

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Jun 6, 2023

Colleges Are Turning Away Nursing Students

Despite a nursing shortage that existed well before the COVID-19 pandemic turned it desperate, colleges are turning away tens of thousands of applicants to nursing programs.

An article by the nonprofit education news organization The Hechinger Report cites Long Beach (Calif.) City College as a stark example. The college this year accepted only 32 students out of 1,200 nursing applicants. Another California college accepted none.

COVID is to blame for worsening the situation by forcing schools to limit in-person instruction, substituting simulations and telehealth care for the clinical work required of student nurses.

Hospitals where students would normally get the hands-on clinical experience are turning them down, according to the report, because they are too busy to provide the training and can’t spare the personal protective equipment.

“It’s very shortsighted of them,” Sigrid Sexton, chair of the nursing program at Long Beach City College, told Hechinger reporter Matt Krupnick. “We’re very supportive of the hospitals’ needs to protect patients, but we’d like to see them be more supportive of students.”

Even when students are able to find a facility willing to accept them, many are required to buy their own personal protective equipment and pay for their own COVID tests.

“When you start putting extra costs on the students and the programs, that becomes a barrier,” said John Cordova, a nurse who directs California’s Health Workforce Initiative.

Problems with nurse training have been developing for years, notes the report. Faculty shortages kept many schools from increasing enrollment to meet the demand. Other schools had to limit enrollment even before COVID for lack of faculty.

Sharon Goldfarb, dean of health sciences at the College of Marin and a regional president of the California Organization of Associate Degree Nursing, said a third of the state’s nursing schools have lost faculty since March. The average age of those remaining is 62.

A key reason is the relatively low pay of teachers, especially when compared to practicing nurses. In California, the average annual pay for an experienced RN is $113,000. Indeed puts the average pay for junior college instructors in California at $65,748. The majority of nurses are trained in junior and community colleges.

Between the shortage of clinical opportunities and the lack of in-person teaching, educators fear many new graduates may not be sufficiently prepared.

“It would be naive to say, ‘Oh, no, this won’t affect them at all,’ ” said Renae Schumann, dean of the Houston Baptist University nursing school in Texas. “Yes, we all worry about it.”

Photo by Luis Melendez on Unsplash

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