People you’ll probably never meet are often the ones who actually tell your doctor what’s wrong with you.
Elizabeth Black is one of those people.
Black, the administrative director of the Sebastian River Medical Center’s laboratory, is more than content to stay out of the limelight as she manages, supervises and leads her team of 19 medical technologists, nine phlebotomists, (the only members of the team patients might actually meet as they are the ones who draw blood samples), and one unit clerk who helps wrangle all the paperwork involved in medical testing.
Usually unseen and un-noticed by the public, today’s medical techs conduct the crucial tests and analysis that physicians need in order to make or confirm a diagnosis and then formulate a viable treatment plan.
“You’d be hard-pressed to run a hospital if you didn’t have a lab,” days Black.
Today’s hospital laboratories are more sophisticated than ever. In SRMC’s case that means millions of dollars worth of equipment, which the medical techs must be able to operate flawlessly. Finely honed analytical skills along with years of on-the-job experience are absolutely essential.
Experience is one thing Black’s team definitely has. Speaking about her staff she says, “We have several [people] who’ve been here over 30 years, one who’s been here over 40 and I’ve been here 27 years.” Collectively, says Black, her team boasts, “a little over 500 years of combined experience.”
That experience doubtless helped in garnering SRMC’s lab its accreditation by the Joint Commission as well as licensing by the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.
Black is especially proud of her staff’s contributions to the SRMC emergency room operations. As an example, she points to the fact that her team can deliver, “a complete blood count and PTT blood clotting test to ER doctors in less than one hour.”
She’s also clearly delighted with a new – and by hospital standards – relatively inexpensive piece of equipment.
“In the past year,” Black explains, “we acquired a [$60,000 pneumatic] tube system that goes directly from the ER to the lab. Now, instead of waiting for someone – a volunteer – to walk samples over from the ER, the new system shoots them directly to the lab at about 25 feet-per-second. It’s crazy fast.”
Working under Dr. Charles Chodorow, the SRMC clinical lab’s medical director, Black employs some football phraseology when talking about her team. “Our laboratory,” says Black, “begins each day with a safety huddle. We review the events of past 24 hours and then move on to the next 24 hours” giving team members the opportunity to make suggestions, report problems and generally try to improve procedures and conditions for both staff and patients.
As in hospitals across the country, SRMC’s laboratory procedures and protocols are constantly evolving. During the recent Ebola scare, for example, entirely new protocols from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had to be implemented at lightning speed in order to protect patients, staff, ambulance crews and the public at large.
Black, who assumed the directorship of the SRMC lab in 2013, flatly states that, “It is imperative that we have competent, experienced technologists using critical thinking skills at all times.”
And she does mean “at all times.”
The lab works 24 hours each day. Typically, according to Black, it has, six technologists on duty during the day shift with others plugging into the second shift and still others on duty for the midnight shift.
Since SRMC is not a big city trauma center Black says it doesn’t often see what she calls, “knife and gun club” types of injuries. “We mostly see,” explains Black, “acutely ill patients and elderly patients” and, according to the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science, those are often the patients for whom fast, reliable and accurate lab work can mean the most.
Small wonder then that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment opportunities for medical laboratory technologists and technicians are projected to grow exponentially in the next few years. “An increase in the aging population,” says the BLS, “will lead to a greater need to diagnose medical conditions through laboratory procedures.”
According to Black, medical technologists must be licensed by the Florida Department of Health after obtaining a two- or four-year degree and those licenses must be renewed every two years. A willingness to enroll in continuing education is another prerequisite for the job, according to the lab’s director.
When medical technologist or phlebotomist positions do open up at SRMC, Black says they are posted on the hospital’s website: www.sebastianrivermedical.com. She warns they are not jobs for people who want to constantly be in the spotlight. They’re better suited, she confides, to people with finely honed analytical and critical thinking skills and a deep sense of teamwork.