It was Sunday afternoon, April 29, at the Clinical Laboratory Management Association (CLMA) conference in Atlanta, when my MLO colleague and I stepped onto a bus filled with laboratory professionals from across the country, to drive across town for a tour of the Emory Medical Laboratory that had been graciously arranged by Emory University Hospital. The tour was something of a whirlwind, as I will describe below, but it was both invaluable and inspiring, we learned much, and we were moved by the dedication and patient-orientation of the laboratorians we met at Emory.
We were welcomed by the site visit leader, Corinne R. Fantz, PhD, DABCC. Corinne is an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine of Emory University School of Medicine and was the Core Lab Tour Guide. She explained to us that we would break up into small groups and then rotate among several laboratories, spending ten minutes or so in each. We would meet a lab leader in each one who would describe the work done there, the instrumentation used, the challenges faced and met. If all went well (and it did), the groups would all finish their tours in a little over an hour.
We visited the Core Laboratory; the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory; the Transfusion, Blood Bank, and Hemaphresis Laboratory; the Flow Cytometry Laboratory; the Special Chemistry and Special Coagulation Laboratories; the Immunology Laboratory; the Histocompatibility & Molecular Immunogenetics Laboratory; and the Histology Laboratory. Many, many thanks to the guides and facilitators who shared their time and knowledge with us as we moved from lab to lab: Robert A. Bray, Ph.D; Jim Craft, MT(ASCP); Lydia Dodson-Lehrer, MBA, MT(ASCP); Crystal Evans, MT(ASCP); Corinne R. Fantz, PhD; Jeannette Guarner, MD; Ellie Hamilton, MT(ASCP); Charles E. Hill, MD, PhD; Kathryn Lee, MT III(ASCP); Kimberly Ann Randolph, MT(ASCP); Louette Vaughn, RN; and Anne M. Winkler, MD. There was a lot to absorb in a short time, and we had more questions than we had time to ask, but we learned a great deal, and the experience was extremely valuable.
One thing I learned is that even a Laboratory with a national reputation for excellence such as Emory's has challenges to face–one of them being providing the best possible services in an always-changing profession in a limited physical space. I spoke by phone with Corinne a few days later, and she acknowledged this, but said the people make the difference. I quote her: “With our lab being in an older hospital building and constrained by firewalls and other structural impediments, we have certainly turned this challenge into an opportunity–an opportunity to grow our knowledge of LEAN and developing lean processes. The real credit for being able to function effectively in small spaces goes to the technologists who work in our labs day in and day out. They are the ones who have the great ideas about process efficiencies, embracing automation when it makes sense and streamlining manual processes when it doesn't. We are extremely fortunate to have such talented and dedicated staff.”
Indeed, we lab “tourists” saw that for ourselves. The leaders who guided us through the tour gave unselfishly of their time to help a group of visitors learn about the profession by watching it being performed expertly. They explained the labs' functions and answered our questions with conspicuous professionalism. But there were also some laboratorians we did not speak with–those who were at their benches, on that Sunday afternoon, serving the patients of Emory University Hospital. They were busy at their work, doing things that were more urgent than hosting out-of-towners. The image of the Emory laboratorians at work was what stayed in my mind as we boarded the bus and rode back to downtown Atlanta–and that is the image of the tour that remains most vivid for me.
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