Authorized Personnel Only: Behind the scenes with the part of health care that you never hear about

Story by Chris Graham

You’ve probably never thought about what happens when doctors orders tests done in the lab. You might assume that they take them back to wherever the testing is done and do the work themselves.

I don’t know what I thought before, but now that I know what the real deal is, I can admit that I had no idea what really goes on, just that the work was done, and that I wanted to believe that whoever did it knew what they were doing.

“I call clinical laboratory science the best-kept secret in health care, because there’s only a very few people who know really what we do behind the scenes here in the laboratory,” said Bernadette Bekken, who goes by Bernie, and who has been the director of the School of Clinical Laboratory Science at the Augusta Medical Center and its predecessor program at the old King’s Daughters’ Hospital for a quarter century.

Bekken led me on a detailed tour of the lab at AMC to give me a chance to learn more about the School of Laboratory Science and what its students are learning and what is expected of laboratory scientists at Augusta Medical Center and at hospitals across the country. I could sum it up simply as “a lot” and you’d likely get my drift, but seriously, there’s more to that “a lot” than I can even begin to let on, and when you come down to it, “a lot” doesn’t even do it justice.

Take the scenario that I described above and that most of us are familiar with. You get your blood drawn. “Once you have your blood drawn, or any kind of specimen from the body, it is brought back here into the laboratory and processed and run through various instruments, depending on the kind of tests ordered for the specimen,” Bekken explained for me as we began our tour.

“We have very high-tech instrumentation here, all run by computers, robots, different types of analyzers. And the people performing these tests, with only a couple of exceptions, are baccalaureate-prepared individuals who have degrees in clinical laboratory science or medical technology,” Bekken said.

Baccalaureate-prepared means what you think it means. You have to have a college degree to break into the lab-scientist field, but you actually need a little bit more than that. And that’s what Bekken oversees at AMC at the School of Clinical Laboratory Science, a one-year postgraduate program for college grads with degrees usually in chemistry or biology who learn the tricks of the clinical-lab trade in a hands-on hospital setting.

“We’re preparing these students - they’ll say intensively preparing these students, because it isn’t anything like college - to be eligible to sit for the national certification examinations and be able to practice in any laboratory,” Bekken said.

The focus is on the pathophysiology of disease, “the study,” according to an official-sounding definition that I found online, “of the biological and physical manifestations of disease as they correlate with the underlying abnormalities and physiological disturbances.” In layman’s terms, and I’m glad Bekken broke it down for me in layman’s terms, given my utter cluelessness about these kinds of things otherwise, lab scientists are trained to look for deviations from the normal, and that’s across the board, be it in possible bad reactions to a blood transfusion that can be mitigated ahead of time through basic tests that can be performed in 30 minutes to complex analyses that can be performed in a flash using high-tech computer scanners that can provide data from even microscopic samples.

There are six students in the AMC program this year, four of whom are the beneficiaries of scholarships made available for the first time in the 2008-2009 school year by the Augusta Health Care Community Foundation totaling $15,000. The scholarships come in handy because the School of Clinical Laboratory Science program is demanding in terms of the time commitment involved.

“It is a huge help. Because I get to work two hours a day, four days a week. And of course that’s not going to pay for rent, gas, food, anything. We make, like, a hundred dollars a week. That’s not going to pay for a whole lot. So getting that scholarship to pay for school, pay for books, and then gives us spending money, it’s a huge help,” student Jessi Jones said.

Lisa Litchfield received a $5,000 scholarship that is coming in handy as she comes to the end of a long odyssey through the health-education arena that had the single mother earning certification as a massage therapist before working toward a bachelor’s in nursing and then deciding to pursue laboratory science at the urging of a professor.

“I always liked my labs better than my classes, and I did better in them,” said Litchfield, a mother of two who no doubt sets a good example for her children with the study habits that she has gained over the seven-plus years that she has spent at Blue Ridge Community College, Eastern Mennonite University and now AMC.

The scholarship program is not necessarily just a nice community-service kind of thing on the part of the AHC Community Foundation. “We’re looking at a huge turnover of people in our lab in the coming years because of the number of employees that we have here in their 50s and 60s, such as myself, that are getting ready for retirement. So we’re looking to the future,” Bekken said, noting a shortage of lab scientists across the country that is nearing crisis proportions in some areas.

This is maybe not surprising considering the demands on those who want to enter the field for the highest levels of training possible and the relatively low salaries for those entering the field, usually in the $30,000 to $35,000 range.

And yet, what would hospitals do without them? They wouldn’t function, is the answer.

“Seventy to eighty percent of all of the information that a physician needs to make a diagnosis and design a followup treatment comes from the laboratory. We’re a valuable part of the health-care team, but as I said, we’re the best-kept secret in health care, because we’re behind the doors that say Authorized Personnel Only,” Bekken said.