Medical laboratory
More comprehensive services can be found in acute-care hospitals and medical centers, where 70% of clinical decisions are based on laboratory testing.
[2] Doctors offices and clinics, as well as skilled nursing and long-term care facilities, may have laboratories that provide more basic testing services.
For instance, some health facilities have a single laboratory for the microbiology section, while others have a separate lab for each specialty area.
The decline is primarily due to retirements, and to at-capacity educational programs that cannot expand which limits the number of new graduates.
Professional organizations and some state educational systems are responding by developing ways to promote the lab professions in an effort to combat this shortage.
[13] Recruitment campaigns, funding for college programs, and better salaries for the laboratory workers are a few ways they are focusing to decrease the vacancy rate.
[15][16] Highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, work is being done to address this shortage including bringing pathology and laboratory medicine into the conversation surrounding access to healthcare.
[17] COVID-19 brought the laboratory to the attention of the government and the media, thus giving opportunity for the staffing shortages as well as the resource challenges to be heard and dealt with.
Some laboratories specialize in Molecular diagnostic and cytogenetic testing, in order to provide information regarding diagnosis and treatment of genetic or cancer-related disorders.
This allows laboratory analyzers, computers and staff to recognize what tests are pending, and also gives a location (such as a hospital department, doctor or other customer) for results reporting.
Many specimens end up in one or more sophisticated automated analysers, that process a fraction of the sample to return one or more test results.
According to various regulations, such as the international ISO 15189 norm, all pathological laboratory results must be verified by a competent professional.
In some countries, staffs composed of clinical scientists do the majority of this work inside the laboratory with certain abnormal results referred to the relevant pathologist.
Doctor Clinical Laboratory scientists have the responsibility for limited interpretation of testing results in their discipline in many countries.
In other testing areas, only professional medical staff (pathologist or clinical Laboratory) is involved with interpretation and consulting.
Credibility of medical laboratories is paramount to the health and safety of the patients relying on the testing services provided by these labs.
Different provincial oversight bodies mandate laboratories in EQA participations like LSPQ (Quebec), IQMH (Ontario) for example.
[22] Clinical laboratory services includes large multinational corporations such LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Sonic Healthcare[23] but a significant portion of revenue, estimated at 60% in the United States, is generated by hospital labs.
Clinical laboratories are supplied by other multinational companies which focus on materials and equipment, which can be used for both scientific research and medical testing.
[27] In general, laboratory equipment includes lab centrifuges, transfection solutions, water purification systems, extraction techniques, gas generators, concentrators and evaporators, fume hoods, incubators, biological safety cabinets, bioreactors and fermenters, microwave-assisted chemistry, lab washers, and shakers and stirrers.
