Lab Week

Well, we have just finished National Lab Week! How exciting! That was sarcasm, folks. For more information on this national event go here. How did we celebrate this event recognizing medical laboratory professionals? Lets see . . . . one day we got free pizza - 3 slices only please. The next day, we got one doughnut, two if your were quick. Then we were treated to ice cream, one ice cream bar. And one day we got a piece of cake. And on the last day, we were promised sandwiches, but ended up with pizza again.

What a sterling week! By the end I felt truly honored as a professional Medical Technologist. That was sarcasm again.

Next year I think I will take a week of vacation instead. Sigh.

Payroll

Once again we have had a payroll meltdown in our lab. The time clocks just stopped working recently. Now we are on the honor system and report our hours in writing to our supervisors. What is so frusterating is that this has happened before and just keeps on happening. I wonder why, if the company that does payroll is not performing the way it should, a new company is not hired. And so, we will get paid based on some assumptions about our attendance, and it will all be fixed on our next paycheck. So I am told. I find that I have to scrutinize my paycheck to keep the company from errors in their favor - never in my favor, of course.

Remember, this is a Fortune 500 multinational company, and they can't get the payroll right all the time.

I am a lab rat. Don't mess around with my cheese!

The Mission Statement

A few years ago, in what seemed the actions of mysterious invisible elves, nicely framed Labcorp mission statements suddenly appeared above all the employee time clocks in our lab. The Mission Statement can be seen here.

This sounds all wonderful and high-falutin', but it is just plain bull puckey. The whole goal for Labcorp is to "create value for our shareholders and opportunities for our employees."

I can tell you that opportunities for employees just do not happen. It makes me wonder about the value for the shareholders part as well. And you can plainly see where patient care falls in their priorities.

Where I work, part time employees are not allowed unless they do not have any benefits. Two part time people filling in one full time job costs the company an extra person's benefits. And we are told to wait for our breaks in order to use the restrooms. This is something you hear about in third-world assembly line factories that exploit workers, not a modern large U.S. based corporation.

Employees under conditions such as these can hardly delight customers. And with patient care taking second place to creating "value for our shareholders", I see that ethical standards are bent and broken every day in the lab.

The accountability part just puts the onus on the employee and takes the pressure off the management and gives them someone to blame when things go wrong.

What I see is that some people hired are excellent, a lot of people, especially in the entry level jobs that are concerned with data entry and accessioning, turn out to be unsuitable for doing the job.

Conserving company resources leads to what I have described before in my post labeled "Running on Empty".

Employees are the corporation's largest and most burdensome expense. When profits are down and expenses must be cut, employees are the first to go. Like Dilbert says, "Its like printing money." But no thought seems to be given to the increased workload of those left behind. What the corporation never seems to get is that too much work for too few people invariably leads to customer dissatisfaction.

Compromising the Specimen

Compromising the Specimen

Most people think that when a lab messes up a specimen, they either lose the specimen or mix it up with another specimen. These are the mistakes that get the most press and cause the most lawsuits. But these mistakes are rare and zealously guarded against. Bad publicity costs money, after all.

One of the most common mistakes a lab makes that compromises a specimen is to fail to preserve it properly. Most specimens must be preserved until testing, most commonly by refrigeration. Some must be frozen or must use a chemical preservative. When that doesn’t happen, and the test is run anyway and results reported out, and no comment added regarding the failure to preserve it properly, then potentially false results are given to the doctor and nobody has any idea that they might be bad results. These results are taken as gospel and treatment and diagnoses are based on them.

By far the most common error in the medical lab is just waiting too long to process and test the specimen. The specimen must be delivered from the point of collection, most often a doctor’s office, to the lab. Then it must be received, and identified. Then it must be accessioned, entered into the lab’s computer system. If many specimens are received at once, some may wait quite a while to be accessioned. Then the specimens sit around until someone can take them to the department that will do the testing. They need labels printed and usually they need to be added to a work list. Then they sit around waiting in line for the lab technologist to get to them and do the test. All of this takes time, often too much time. And as above, no one tells the doctor or patient if a particular specimen has been delayed long enough to compromise the results. No one finds out.

Mostly this is all a result of the Lab not hiring enough people to do the work in a timely manner. This is a way to increase profits by not spending money on personnel. The Lab gets away with this because no one is aware that it is going on, except the employees, who are not going to rat them out, usually because they are afraid they would be fired.

What you don’t know can hurt you.