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Bringing together clinical and public health laboratory workforces to improve communication and coordination of patient care during a public health crisis is the goal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) OneLabTM Initiative. 

As a grant partner of the CDC OneLab Initiative, the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) launched the Building Bridges webinar series in Spring 2023. Building Bridges, which is embarking on its third season, facilitates discussions among the greater laboratory community on unique collaborations and partnerships that have resolved laboratory workforce challenges. 

“The key is that we are all part of a (laboratory) system where we are working for patient care,” says Christine Bean, PhD, MBA, MLS(ASCP), Chief Learning Officer with the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). “We are working for public health and to ensure people in the communities receive the care they need.”   

Dr. Bean previously served for 17 years as director of the New Hampshire State Public Health Laboratory. Her work with both clinical and public health laboratories throughout her career has given her a unique perspective on the importance of coordinated patient care and disease surveillance. Dr. Bean’s ability to speak about the importance of this issue is the reason ASCP recruited her to help secure speakers for its Building Bridges webinar series.  

In its first Building Bridges series, ASCP hosted leaders from academic research laboratories, clinical laboratories, laboratory coalitions, and public health laboratories on a national level, and commercial laboratories to present case studies as examples of collaborating to resolve laboratory capacity and workforce challenges. 

“The pandemic is a good example [of a challenge for the laboratory],” Dr. Bean explains. “It made it so clear that we are all one laboratory system, which includes clinical laboratories, reference laboratories, public health laboratories, point of care testing sites where testing is being done. We really had to work together to share resources, workloads, identify limitations that system partners were experiencing, and determine how we could help each other and make sure that the state could offer support via communication and resources, so that we could keep each other informed as went along, knowing what we had in capacity.” 

After completing the first Building Bridges series, however, organizers determined what was missing was the presence and perspective of state and local public health laboratories that are so critical to the immediate identification of emerging outbreaks and to coordinate with clinical laboratories serving as sentinel laboratories, according to Debby Basu, PhD, Senior Manager of Global Health and Workforce Development Grant Programs at the ASCP Center for Global Health. 

“For this reason, we sought out engagement with APHL through Dr. Bean,” Dr. Basu adds. “With her enthusiastic collaboration in the (second Building Bridges) series, we were able to engage public health laboratories in sharing their experiences collaborating both with clinical laboratories and each other over a wide breadth of topics,” Dr. Basu says. “In this series, we engaged over 1,300 registrants and almost 670 attendees, with the distribution of attendance really reflecting that blend of clinical and public health laboratories as well as other laboratory sectors that our program sought to achieve.” 

So far, the case studies have addressed topics such as coordination of emergency response efforts, managing supply chain disruptions, approaching how to be more mindful of implementing best practices in diversity, equity, and inclusion for the laboratory workforce, and offering collaborative experiences at training and fellowship through laboratory twinning and regional trainings.  

Additionally, participants in the Building Bridges series have inquired about training opportunities, including fellowships and internships, and they expressed interest in having the webinar series address career pathways. This led ASCP to seek out individuals who could speak to career pathways as part of its third series, which will launch in early 2025. “We will focus on highlighting career pathways in the laboratory and how collaborations, partnerships, and opportunities can help shape these dynamic career pathways,” Dr. Basu says.  

ASCP is currently looking for subject matter experts across the spectrum of laboratory positions and sectors—clinical laboratory, public health laboratory, academic research, commercial labs, etcetera—to speak about their own career trajectories, how they have been influenced by collaboration, partnerships across different laboratory sectors, and opportunities that have influenced their career pathways. Anyone who would like to nominate an individual as a candidate for this career pathways-focused webinar series is encouraged to email their information to grants@ascp.org.  

As she looks ahead to the third series of Building Bridges, Dr. Bean reflects on the program’s growth and its success in achieving the goal of getting laboratories across the spectrum to come together and share resources and best practices. 

“We all have workforce needs that are similar,” she says. “We need to improve our recruitment into the laboratory workforce. When laboratory professionals from all sectors come together like a team, it showcases that we have one system in place and that, when we need greater capacity, we do have the people to accomplish that.”