FORT LEE, Va. (April 21, 2016) -- National Laboratory Week is an annual celebration of laboratory professionals and pathologists who play a vital role in every aspect of health care.
Lab techs work behind the scenes -- few people know about the critical testing they perform every day.
"Represented by every result produced on a test, or cell examined under a microscope, is a patient; my patient," said Staff Sgt. Tashara Coleman, laboratory technician. "The information I provide will make a difference in the life of my patient."
Medical technologists and medical laboratory technicians play a crucial role in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease. In fact, around 75 percent of all medical decisions are based on results from the laboratory.
The lab tech community is a highly trained and versatile component of the health care system. They perform phlebotomy, serology, transfusion services, and urinalysis testing in assistance of the health care providers caring for patients.
They possess varying degrees in science and have multi-faceted skill sets. Their talents include advanced instrumentation troubleshooting and repair and information systems manager-level abilities to build, adapt and inter-communicate test results between instrumentation and computers and throughout the military and civilian electronic health record.
KAHC lab techs are responsible for producing over 180,000 test results and collecting approximately 12,000 phlebotomy samples annually.
The lab techs here are among the best. This is proven time and time again. It is evident by the over 100 blind sample proficiency testing samples the staff is challenged with each year. These samples are sent by the College of American Pathologists and are graded amongst thousands of participating laboratories. Each challenge requires 80 percent of results to be correct in order to be considered successful. They consistently achieve 100 percent on these challenges.
The laboratory also provides screening for unseen diseases in newborns, check-ups for the aging later in life that enable early detection of common ailments, and monitoring and prevention of the spread of contagious organisms throughout the community.
Many results produced by the lab also provide in-depth monitoring of the progress of treatment for organ-specific conditions. In some cases the insight provided by lab results warns of the propensity of a patient to develop disease. And finally, as an Army medical health care laboratory, the KAHC lab provides vital information concerning Soldiers readiness to deploy through specific and regular screening.
The culmination of education, experience, technical know-how, operational organization and passion for patient care is why laboratorians are indispensable and irreplaceable, champions who assist health care provider's in the treatment of their patients.
Without their astute discernment of the results generated, the reliability of a laboratory report would not be worth the paper it's printed on.
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