The Hidden Profession No More

Laboratory medicine, as a profession, is in trouble. Due to burnout, retirements, and funding issues, our laboratories are extremely understaffed. Meanwhile, we are performing more tests every year.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States performs 14 billion medical laboratory tests per year. To put this in perspective, 14 billion seconds is 444 years. While we absolutely need to help support our current employees, we also need to bring in new employees on a scale that wasn’t imagined several years ago.  

Over the course of three articles, I will explain how we can help young people become knowledgeable about laboratory medicine careers as well as create plans to enter college for specific laboratory careers. The focus of this first article is on what laboratories and individual laboratory professionals can easily do to immediately help inform and recruit high school students about careers in the laboratory in just a few months via a three-step process. 

Guest speakers 

The first step to raising the visibility of laboratory careers to high school students is to ensure that all students in the United States know what careers in the medical laboratory field are available for them to pursue. We cannot rely on students randomly finding out about laboratory careers. We need laboratories to actively reach out to high schools to ask to have their staff come in to do a guest speaker presentation on laboratory careers. ASCP has created a career pathway flyer and individual flyers for 11 laboratory medicine careers. The presentation should not only include information about careers but also a hands-on component for students to imagine themselves working in the field. Creating this experience does not require reinventing the wheel thanks to ASCP’s Career Ambassadors program. The program provides resources for the guest speaker. Laboratories may want to have one of their employees take time off the bench to go around to local schools to do these presentations.   

Field trips 

At the same time laboratories are scheduling guest speaker presentations with the schools, they should also offer to have the students who attend the presentation take a field trip to their laboratory. This is step two in hooking students on medical laboratory careers. By bringing students to our labs who have already learned about careers in the laboratory, we can deepen their interest in joining a career in our field. The field trip can be short and just a quick walk around for an hour or so that shows them briefly what each career does. If it is possible, I like a longer experience like my medical laboratory high school students do with Catholic Health Laboratories. The students follow a patient case while touring the lab and have hands-on stations where they can imagine themselves working in a laboratory. Our students get the opportunity to ask questions and see more samples coming through in each area of the laboratory. After touring the laboratory for several hours, the students get lunch, and we discuss the results they collected for the patient case. This allows for students to experience how laboratory results are generated and how this leads to positive patient outcomes. 

Shadowing experiences 

So far, we have informed students about careers in our field and most, now post-field trip, have seen what it is like to work in a laboratory. In step three, students who have become highly interested will be able to dive more deeply into what it is like to work in a specific laboratory career(s). This will be done via a shadowing experience(s) that lasts two to eight hours. As an example from my class, we have an eight-hour pathologists’ assistant shadow. Our students will spend three and a half hours in the gross room with the pathologists’ assistants, watching them dissect organs coming down from surgery. They will then spend about 30 minutes with a pathologist as they diagnose disease. They will then go to a post-autopsy conference so they have a complete understanding of what roles pathologists’ assistant may have. The shadow experience can be confirmatory that this is the career for them or can let them know that is not a career they should pursue. As an example, one of my students who completed the PA shadow determined that she will spend her next six years pursuing a career as a PA while another student determined that she could not handle the smell of the gross room along with some of the diseased organs. 

Call to action 

The goal of every member of the laboratory medicine community needs to be bringing our field out of the shadows so we are no longer the “hidden profession.”  Initially, we will ensure that every high school student in the country knows about laboratory medicine careers just as well as they know about other careers in medicine. Laboratories investing in this type of community education can help ensure a steady flow of new blood entering the field. Additionally, laboratories can benefit themselves by creating powerful experiences through the three-step process described in this article. Having every student in your area, by the time they leave high school, knowing and understanding significant details about laboratory medicine careers will ensure that in a few years, most Americans will know we exist.  

Stay tuned for part two of this series, which will explore how to ensure that schools and the wider community get a better understanding of what our profession is all about.