So you're interested in learning more?! Well you came to the right page!
While our candy lab promotes a sweet time and delicious activities, it truly highlights the different aspects of working in the Medical Laboratory Profession!
Becoming an MLT means working in one of the 5 disciplines, and dealing with real patient samples, all behind the scenes of most hospitals and clinics.
It may not be as fun as making candy, or counting skittles, but it can be a fulfilling job, surrounded by analyzers, reagents and enough patient samples to go around!
Although patient interactions do still occur, the job is not directly patient facing, meaning you don't need to have to best people skills to do the job!
To learn more about each one, you can either click any of these buttons or scroll directly to the department of your choosing!
WHY DO WE NEED MEDICAL LABORATORY TECHNOLOGISTS???
We need them because your tests cannot performed without them!
When you go to a clinic or hospital, and give a sample, wether it be urine, blood, tissue, CSF, a throat swab, or even stool, it must go to a medical laboratory professional for testing. It is for that reason that laboratory technologists oversee a majority of the samples that are collected. The different departments collect the sample and run the necessary tests according to the requisition.
How do you become an MLT?
1. First you have to go to school - in Alberta only a few post secondary institutions offer an Medical lab related program. U of A - Medical Laboratory Scientist (Longer program). SAIT & NAIT - Medical Laboratory Technologist (Shorter program). Regardless of which program you recieve relatively the same education.
APPLICATION TO THE PROGRAM: involves an interview where you will have to answer questions in a times format. These my be theory education based questions, communcation skills, scenarios, or things to do with patients.
You also need to make sure you complete any prerequisites required.
Once you're accepted into the program you are ready to learn!!
2. Complete your required courses at the intuition of your choosing and then you are sent off to your clinical placement. This includes a 9 month placement at a site somewhere within the province. At NAIT you can be placed in Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Red Deer, or Grand Prairie. For that clinical placement you get to learn how things work in industry and practice your skills! You also get tested throughout it to make sure you're on the right track!
3. Writing your licensing exam! Right now Alberta graduates are writing the CSMLS exam. This includes over 200 questions in 3hrs. And tests you on things that you learned throughout your program and your clinical placement.
4. You did it and you now get to work in a lab in any of the 5 disciplines!
**Make sure you do your research, go to open houses at universities, contact the program, see if you know anyone in a related field, and know about your program and what you are getting into!**
QC
While quality controls itself is not a department, it plays a role in every department because they are used to make sure MLT results are accurate.
Think of it like this, MLTs heavily rely on analyzers to perform daily testing, HOWEVER the analyzers rely on the MLTs daily, to make sure they are working the way they should. That means that while the machine can test multiple samples at once, do not mean it will give you the answer you want. Sometimes things can go wrong, which is why it is so important to use quality controls, because they are basically tests MLTs give the machine to make sure the answer is right!
To explain it 'sweeter' terms, QC is like blindfolding your ice cream enthusiast friend and making them guess the ice cream flavour. If they guess vanilla ice cream and the flavour is indeed vanilla, then your test works, they are in fact an ice cream connoisseur. HOWEVER if you blindfold your friend and they say strawberry ice cream instead of vanilla, you know something is wrong with your friend, and you should intervene!
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Although the machines in the medical laboratory profession are much more sensitive, and efficient, they also make errors sometimes, which is why MLTs and QC are still so very important when it comes to laboratory tests and results!
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While the analyzers and machines do a lot of the heavy lifting, in terms of tough manual calculations an receptive motions, they would be nearly useless without the eye of a well trained medical lab professional!
CHEMISTRY
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The chemistry department is the busiest of the departments. Here medical lab professionals perform a variety of tests on patient samples such as urine, blood, CSF and more!
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In this discipline, MLTs work hand and hand with many analyzers to perform the tests needed. There is different kinds of analyzers for different specimens, and are often u
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HEMATOLOGY
In this department you will see a lot of blood, so I hope you are not too sqwimish. This job is quite interesting, as you often are looking under the microscope for any abnormalities that may be lurking in the bloodstream. Our blood contains many different cells other than our red blood cells, it also contains our white blood cells and platelets. The white blood cells help our body invade foreign attackers and the platelets are the things that cause the scab on your injury. Platelets play a very important role in the body by stopping our blood from clotting!
HISTOLOGY
In this department you get to deal with a lot of different tissue samples that get sent to the lab. Ranging from skin biopsies to even a whole leg (although we don't do much with large organs/limbs you might encounter it still!). MLTs in this discipline then make small cuts of these tissues and stain them for a pathologist (doctor) to view!
Typically a MLT is histology will either dissect small tissue samples, or if small enough already, place them in solutions that will fix the tissue, to stop them from decaying. This process involves placing the tissues in formalin, so that we can then cover the fixed tissue entirely with wax. The wax helps hold the tissue together when we bring it to a slicer (microtome) that slices the tissue into VERY thin sheets. This process can be tedious because the thin sections are very fragile. This part of histology is also considered the most dangerous, because the blasé used to cut the tissue is very sharp!
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Once the tissue is sliced into very think sections, they are placed onto glass slides. These glass slides provide the tissue a suitable surface to get dyed. Due to the fact that every body tissue has different parts in it, like skin has collagen, and the liver has lots of iron, each tissue might require a different stain to accentuate its components.
Think of an MLT in histology like a Chef with a cake. The chef would grab the cake, and take a small piece from it. They would then make sure it is fixed, so it won't mold, then place it in jello. The jello acts like the wax to hold the cake in the middle. From there the Chef would very thinly slice the piece of cake to see each and every sliver. The think slice of the cake is then stained so the chef can see the sugar, flour and baking soda that was put into it. The sugar, flour and baking soda would stain a different color so it becomes easier to tell them apart.
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Once the tissue is fixed, sliced and stained, it is then looked at by the MLT before sending it to a pathologist to review.
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This discipline would be considered fun for an individual that finds it interesting to look at different tissue components, work with formalin, xylene and other carcinogenic substances and have an eye for precision because some errors cannot be reversed (you can't take 2 left legs).
MICROBIOLOGY
Traditionally, MLTs that work in the microbiology department are responsible for studying tiny living things - such as bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses! Pretty much anything that can cause infections in humans. MLTs have developed a skilled eye that is good at detecting, identifying and helping treat those nasty infections.
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Think of it as the department that answers the question:
"What organism is making this patient sick? And how do we help them get better?
TRANSFUSION
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Not only are transfusions critical for patients, but working in the Transfusion Lab is a critical job in itself! Working in this department means you are calling the shots on blood matching, which will directly affect a patient. It is one of the only disciplines whose judgement is not overseen by another medical professional prior to the patient receiving their treatment. This means that any work done MUST be accurate in order to deliver the most precise results.
In this department, movements must become mastered, but not just muscle memory! Every step needs to be double-checked, in oder to ensure there are no mess ups!