8-17 FB Rural Medical Technologists

David Sparks Ph.D.

 What can be worse than waiting for lab results when it comes to your health. Your doctor says “I think you might be diabetic…let’s send in a blood sample and find out”…or “this is an infection I haven’t seen before. We better get it checked out.” Some sample is taken and sent off to a lab. But where is the lab and how long do you have to bite your nails and worry before the results come back. In Northern Idaho, there has been a shortage of medical technologists who conduct such tests.

 Here’s Caroline  Bohach, Researcher and Director of the Microbiology Program at the University of Idaho. “There’s a shortage for trained medical technologists and that’s particularly true in North Idaho in rural communities because the employed medical technologists are aging, and they can’t replace them with new medical technologists. The hospital laboratories are in danger of having to close. What that would mean for hospitals in smaller communities is they’d need to send all their specimens to California to get a test result. So the U of I partnered with Sacred Heart Medical Center which has a training program for medical technologists to have two seats for  a special track for medical technology training that is for rural medicine.”