Laboratory services are an essential part of any hospital, offering a range of diagnostic testing that is crucial for patients to understand their health and for providers to understand how to best care for them.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for diagnostic testing and quick analysis has increased exponentially. Thankfully, Michael Garron Hospital’s (MGH) laboratory services team has stepped up to the challenge, working hard to strike a balance between managing the need for COVID-testing while also maintaining their regular services and even introducing new ones.
“Everything that we, as a department, have been able to do during this pandemic has been because of the incredible hard work and dedication of our lab technicians and technologists,” says Laura Finlay, lab manager at MGH. “The team has come together as one to do whatever is needed to protect the health and safety of our patients. This true sense of teamwork has allowed us to contribute to MGH’s pandemic response without having to stop any of our regular services.”
Here are some of the ways in which the team has made this happen:
Contingency planning
“Lab workers are often future planners by nature. As soon as we recognized that COVID-19 would become a pandemic, we began to create Plan B’s for our original Plan B’s.
A lot of our planning centered around resources – understanding what services we were offering, what supplies would be needed to facilitate those and trying to anticipate what supply chain issues we may experience because of the pandemic. All of this pre-planning ensured that we had enough swabs for our COVID-19 Assessment Centre and emergency department, while also not running low on any of our other diagnostic testing supplies because we still needed to keep our lab running for all of the other tests that we offer.
We also looked at the resources that we needed to care for patients. The Canadian Blood Services was worried about shortages in blood supplies, so we reviewed our already robust emergency blood management plan to make sure that we were meticulously evaluating every blood request we received and preventing any wastage.”
Creating capacity
“Similar to many other departments and services throughout the hospital, the pandemic increased our workloads in several areas. We had 400 to 500 swabs coming in per day! It was vital for us to have the capacity to take on this work and maintain good turnaround times.
Although the hospital had its own redeployment centre, we did a lot of redeployment internally ourselves. We pulled staff from less busy areas such as pathology into areas such as hematology and chemistry so that we had enough staff to perform regular laboratory duties and manage the swabs and those results.
Changing and expanding services
“As service providers, our goal is to always do what is best for our patients and support the clinicians that care for them. During the pandemic, we’ve changed and expanded our services to bring on new tests that are done on-site in order to help support our care providers and meet the needed turnaround time for results. Introducing these tests also eliminates the need for patients to take a second trip elsewhere for these services, reducing their potential exposure. We hope to continue this into the fall, when we plan to bring on new technology for rapid COVID-19 testing for certain patient groups.
On the opposing end, we’ve also made adjustments to our services to temporarily stop unneeded tests that have the potential to be unsafe for staff during this pandemic. Protecting the health and safety of everyone on our team is always a priority.”
Collaboration
“Collaboration is an important part of our day-to-day work in general, but even more so during the pandemic.
MGH, along with several other hospitals, work with the Shared Hospital Labs that process many of our microbiology samples and swabs. During the pandemic, we’ve built on this partnership and collaboration to ensure that we can maintain the COVID-19 testing services we offer in our Assessment Centre and emergency department. Our leadership team is in frequent contact with them, reviewing turnaround times and offering them whatever support we can.
Internally, we’ve worked in close collaboration with occupational health and safety and infection prevention control at MGH to maintain safe standards and offer rapid testing for our healthcare workers that are so diligently caring for our patients and community. Within our own team, I’ve seen such incredible collaboration from our staff who are on the ground and are constantly working together to come up with new and improved ways of doing things more efficiently. Everything we’ve done has been a true team effort.”
