WNV Strains Labs Already Facing Manpower Shortage
Editor's note: This is a guest blog from Irina Lutinger, MPH, MASCP, H(ASCP) DLM, FACHE, senior administrative director at NYU Hospitals Center, New York City and ASCP spokesperson.
There has been a surge of about 20% in the demand for the treatment of West Nile virus during August 2012. This has brought a corresponding increase in issues related to lags in turnaround time because of delays in reagent availability at testing facilities and staffing training.
Since West Nile is an uncommon virus, many facilities are not prepared for this challenge, including manufacturing plants for reagents and supplies for treating patients. The shortage of the laboratory professionals becomes more apparent when a virus has an unexpected surge. A growing laboratory workforce shortage presents a problem for a society as a whole because 70% of physicians' decisions are based on the laboratory outcome.
The American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) is working on several solutions to attract students and second careerists to become laboratory professionals. The ASCP Career Ambassador program sponsored by Roche promotes the laboratory profession to junior high, high school and junior college students nationwide. Additionally, ASCP has a network of regional and local representatives who attend career fairs and STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) forums to promote careers in laboratory medicine.
ASCP has also partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative America and several State Universities of New York to increase the number of medical laboratory graduates by 10% for five consecutive years. This program can be replicated in other states.
The added demand for West Nile Virus testing and foodborne outbreaks presents an additional level of complexity to already dwindling manpower. The laboratory staff has to work more overtime hours to reduce wait time. This approach has its limitations because the individuals who perform these vital tasks cannot continuously perform under such stressful conditions.
The availability of reasonably priced, low complexity, rapid PCR assays on random access platforms has had a very positive impact on the quality of laboratory diagnostic services. Molecular nongrowth dependent technology enables laboratories to provide highly sensitive and specific results round the clock for an increasing variety of dangerous pathogens that during earlier times could take days or weeks to detect and report.
It is critical to seek and select technological applications that eliminate cumbersome, inefficient time and labor-intensive processes. Furthermore, developing educational and training programs with laboratory training programs is another important step in the ability to select and hire much needed laboratory professionals.