Building Advocates for Laboratory Medicine in Your Community
By - October 29, 2024
Laboratory medicine, as was discussed in my previous article, has an employment crisis that is getting worse every year. One major reason is the lack of people in our community, including young people, who know about laboratory medicine careers. According to DataUSA’s database on MLT and MLS graduates, there were almost 7,400 graduates in 2022--3,429 graduates of MLT programs1 and 3,966 graduates of MLS programs.2 This may sound like we are on the right track, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “24,200 openings for clinical laboratory technologists and technicians are projected each year, on average, over the decade.”3 By comparison, we will need 194,500 new registered nurses per year4 and nursing programs graduated 262,974 registered nurses in 2022.5 Nursing is overflowing with workers while laboratory medicine is digging itself deeper and deeper into a hole.
In short, we need to get the word out about the career opportunities available in our field to our surrounding communities.
Community events
This article will cover some of the opportunities that require a little more planning and preparation but do have the opportunity to grow interest in careers in our field. One such concept is to participate in community events like career fairs. At these events, opportunities for participants to perform skills that will help them feel like they are working in a laboratory such as using microscopes, micropipettors, drawing blood on training arm, etc, can help people have a better understanding of the work that the laboratory does. Having hands-on experiences is key to driving interest. Laboratories should investigate community career exploration event pages to find events where they can participate, or even start their own career exploration events. This would require more work to promote, but would also provide a captive audience as well as allow for all areas of the laboratory to be represented, including areas that aren’t typically included, such as histology, cytology, and pathologist assistant.
Takeaways that include laboratory swag and career informational sheets like the information on ASCP’s whatmynext.org website are also important to have at these events. One method of engagement that has been highly successful for us is to have a stamp card--attendees move around the different careers in the laboratory and receive a stamp after participating in the activities at that particular station. If they get all the stamps they can earn a nice prize. Presenting the laboratory in a fun and interesting way helps build advocates who can speak intelligently about career opportunities for young people in an engaging way.
Politician laboratory visits
Every year, as an industry, we reach out to local, state, and federal politicians for Lab Week Proclamations. These are an important part of earning the recognition that we deserve as we are the backbone of medicine, but we need to take it to the next step. For example, inviting politicians to visit our laboratories for a tour. I like to have our political connections come into my laboratory to participate in what I call our “Techs In Training” experience. We put lab coats and gloves on them along with a “lab ID” with their name on it. My students teach them how to do several laboratory skills. While teaching them a skill my students will also discuss facts and provide stories to help the politician understand why our industry is key to the practice of medicine. These leaders often leave inspired by what they have learned. This is also an excellent time to remind them of key bills happening in their legislative bodies that will support our industry. Laboratories should be reaching out throughout the year to find time for these leaders to come in and see what we are really doing to ensure the health of our nation.
Call to action
I described in my previous article the low hanging fruits (level one initiatives) for growing the potential base of laboratory workers and how to do it. This article builds on that work by discussing how we can do more to increase the span of our outreach. We need laboratories to invest the time, energy, and resources to build knowledgeable advocates all around us that can speak about laboratory medicine careers to young people interested in science or medicine careers. As a level two initiative, this will require more from laboratories and ambitious individuals but is necessary to ensure that we are casting as wide of a net as possible. Everyone thinks they know what nurses do and hence why they have more graduates than they need. If we were able to encourage some of the 262,974 nursing graduates prior to nursing school to transition onto a laboratory medicine career path, we could address the shortage in a powerful way.
My next article we will explore how we can create high school training programs using a Career and Technical Education model to train students in medical laboratory and phlebotomy skills while preparing them for careers in the field that require a college degree.
References
James Payne
WEMOCO Medical Laboratory Assisting and Phlebotomy Instructor