Building The Foundation for Our Future

As laboratory professionals, we all know that there is a massive need for more people to decide that a career in a medical laboratory is for them. Our role is vital for modern medicine to function, and a lack of staffing is hurting many smaller hospitals that cannot provide the testing needed by doctors. I have written, in my past two Critical Values articles, about ways to increase awareness of careers in the medical laboratory for young people, particularly in high school and middle school. These have included concepts like guest speakers in every school, more field trips to medical labs, shadowing experiences for interested students, community events to explore the medical laboratory and even bringing politicians into labs to teach them how to work in a lab.

The most effective way, though, is to provide young people with the opportunity to explore careers directly via a high school medical laboratory assisting and phlebotomy program like I have created in Spencerport, New York.

Career and technical education: What is it?

Our high school medical laboratory assisting and phlebotomy program delivers the content via a career and technical education (CTE) model. Career and technical education was formally called vocational education, and the reason for the change was due to a shift in philosophy. CTE is much more comprehensive than vocational education in that we are preparing students for both a career and college. Students are learning college-level content and skills while in our program. My students learn more than 60 different laboratory and phlebotomy skills while learning college-level content in hematology, immunology, microbiology, clinical chemistry, histology, and genetics. It’s not just about skills anymore—it’s about preparing them for immediate employment AND for direct entry into college medical laboratory programs.

The value of learning laboratory skills in high school

Most students explore careers in a passive way such as via a flyer, a video, a family friend, interacting with someone while they are doing their job or if they are lucky a job shadowing experience. The downside to all of this is that students are not actually working in the career, so it is hard to know for certain if that career is one they would want to pursue after high school. When I was at Stony Brook University, there was a saying in the biology department that organic chemistry turned biology majors into psychology majors. I believe that was because most biology majors did not know for certain what career they wanted to go into besides “something in biology.”  So, when they ran into a difficult class, they decided to just move on.

My students on the other hand, are learning how to use laboratory-grade equipment such as binocular microscopes, micropipettors, spectrophotometers, thermocyclers, a gel electrophoresis documentation system, and even microtomes. The goal for them using this equipment is to be skilled enough to independently conduct experiments. Additionally, after several months of training on phlebotomy training arms, my 11th grade students are going to local outpatient draw centers and drawing blood on real patients for their actual medical samples under the supervision of a phlebotomy trainer. This is a 40-hour experience (eight hours per day for five days) and they usually get between 80 and 139 successful venipunctures with very few misses.  In 12th grade, my students also spend 80 hours in various medical laboratories working as laboratory assistants in training. My students can even shadow in a specific med lab career for up to eight hours in their 12th grade year. The difference between those biology students at Stony Brook in the early 2000s and my students is when my students choose to go to college for a medical laboratory career, they know what is behind the curtain and when confronted with a difficult class, they have the drive to push through because they know for certain that this is the career they want to do.

Call to action

Many of you reading this may be shocked at what high school students are doing in Spencerport, NY. We were able to create this program at a local Career and Technical Education center where our students spend 2.5 hours per school day, five days a week. This provides the opportunity for students to learn difficult content and become truly skilled in what they are doing. We were able to create the external training co-ops in phlebotomy and medical laboratories via legal agreements between our school and the two major hospital systems in our region. This allows our students to work with real samples both in collection and basic processing. This is key to offering certification in phlebotomy and medical laboratory assisting as you need external experience prior to sitting for the exams. We were able to secure grants early on to start buying some of the equipment we now have, and we also secured several donations from local laboratories and college programs along with regular budget expenses over the past 14 years.

We need more programs like ours across the country to fill out the entry level ranks but also to ensure that more students go to medical laboratory college programs. I would love to see laboratories taking the reins and reaching out to local/regional Career and Technical Education schools to ask them to start a program because they would have the resources to determine what would be required for a legal agreement to allow for the external training experiences for the students while they are in high school.

Medical laboratories are facing dire understaffing and as laboratory professionals, we need to be proactive in helping raise the visibility of the laboratory and get people interested in a career in the laboratory sooner. By working with high school students, we foster a knowledge of the critical role the laboratory plays in patient care, and an understanding of how they can create a fulfilling and enriching career.