Field Notes 1: UAMS and MLS Training

Hey everyone, welcome to LabReflex We've been playing with the formatting a little bit here at LabReflex recently and we wanted to explore a new concept We're calling field notes This is gonna be part of LabReflex that we sort of step away from the checklists and regulations and all the other sort of Main details and talk about stories or observations lessons that make lab medicine interesting It might be funny It might be inspiring And it might be just simple lessons learned over years and years of you know being in the field It's just gonna be something that we like to try to bring you on Friday Afternoons just a little more so before the weekend begins something fun to kind of look forward to Today's LabReflex Today's field notes is going to focus on a story that we found very interesting That happened in Arkansas so We've been hearing for years about the difficulty in maintaining MLS staffing You know, it's it's commonly known that's Nurse staffing physician staffing PA staffing all these things are high priorities for hospitals But the MLS as we the laboratory is certainly underrepresented in popular culture It's somewhat invisible, especially compared to Some of the similarly trained other portions of the hospital in particular nursing physicians assistants, etc and as a result, you know, sometimes it's it's kind of a challenge to Get the kind of staff and the kind of quality That we need there's a litany of reasons why this is true And I think we've all read different articles about the aging MLS population we've you know heard stories about the alternatives to classically trained MLS is You know, you go do a PhD program or other, you know science You didn't go into nursing and and many other fields that are just more lucrative And so as a result, it's it's darn hard to fill with good people all your positions and in particular in the United States Unfilled positions for MLS positions are somewhere in the eight to ten percent range To give you some sense of perspective Unemployment is only four and a half percent and Unfilled nursing positions are at about a two percent clip for for city nurse positions metropolitan area positions. So what we're seeing is it's Unfilled positions are four times that of nursing positions and rural MLS positions are Significantly worse. They're 15% and higher I Can't even imagine what would happen to our hospital administration if we had 15% Unfilled positions for nursing. I mean the place it's like the walls would fall apart, right? I mean it just like the ceiling would come down. I mean just like sewage would come out of the toilets. I mean like it would be Pandemonium and yet Oftentimes laboratories just keep trucking along Generating good results taking care of patients. So Arkansas Did something that I I just I'm sort of blown away so they Rather than thinking okay. Here's what we're gonna do We're going to Have you Go from you know, I don't know So obviously with with rural MLS positions being in such an unmet need the University of Arkansas for medical sciences came up with a very clever approach and and that approach was Most programs they think about it backwards what they think is how can we move someone? From the big city hospital big city university location Metropolitan area, how can we move that person? To the six right to some rural community But Arkansas said well, hang on a second. There are people who already live in the rural community Maybe what we should do is rather than moving them to the metropolitan area for training and then moving back to the rural community What if we just train them there and then they understand obviously the community they live in the community they'll now understand the hospital system and maybe they will continue to be employed by the hospital system after training is finished and not only that but then you've also Attracted a bunch of bright, you know rural citizens to your program that maybe they couldn't leave Locally, maybe they they had to stay for you know, some family reason or some other reason and so now you've attracted people who you couldn't have retracted before and You've serviced the need that you couldn't really service before remember last week We were talking about how New Mexico was was bribing people to move to New Mexico physicians We're gonna we're gonna pay three hundred thousand dollars in your loans off Well, Arkansas does something even more clever and that is how about we don't pay you anything? We let you take classes online and you just stay in your community and you continue to work there I just I think that that is the absolute way to solve a problem and I think that what we're gonna see is more and more clever approaches to addressing obviously rural health care issues and and other Health care problems where we're having a difficult time meeting the needs for the specialty like MLS and It's a it's a fairly small program right now in Arkansas, but it's growing grown quite a bit over the last two years and They're passing all their boards and they're being certified. And so it's it's it's a hundred percent pass rate So the program is working it's effective and as far as I can tell it doesn't actually cost anything more I mean, maybe there's some sort of you know cost for cameras and things like that But I mean by and large this is a scalable model that I think a lot of other programs would be wise to try and follow So anyway, I thought that was a clever approach to a real major problem not just in Arkansas, but nationwide certainly in West Texas and I just wanted to share that with everybody. So hopefully you found field notes useful and I hope you have a wonderful weekend