Med Lab Week - What We Did

As some of you may know, I am the President of the Med Lab Students' Society at my College this year. As part of our society message, I wanted to increase the awareness about the Medical Laboratory Sciences program as well promote our profession. As a society, we decided to move up Med Lab Week from April 28th - May 3rd to March 25-28th so we could interact with students and faculty before exams rolled around.

We had a full week planned including a blood drive and other fun interactive activities as well as an information table with CSMLS gear to hand out.

CSI Michener - This was our interactive lab station where students and staff had the opportunity to be a "Lab Technologist for a day" and solve a patient case that took them through all 5 disciplines.

We created a patient case involving a patient, Ivana Solveit, who was going in for a liver transplant. The participants had to type their blood (using QC cells), identify a cirrhotic liver under the microscope as well as look at a liver we had grossed and look at a blood film and pick the most likely smear from the patient. Our patient then was suspected to have a UTI from their catheter so the participants looked at a C&S, which included plate media and an API strip and then look at an automated urinalysis result.

Microbiology Station for CSI Michener

Swab It! -  For $2, staff and students could have their phone, shoe, purse, computer etc swabbed and plated on to Blood Agar to see what grew! They received a high-resolution photo of their swab results the next day (often this was more than enough time for some of the swabs we did!). We had some very interesting ones including someone's hand after they had just gotten off the subway, a credit card and some cell phones with a few questionable bacteria present! We had a lot of interest in this activity and many people who didn't end up having anything swabbed came to discuss the process of identifying bacteria and if they could have an alcohol wipe to clean their phone after seeing the photos :o)

One of the phone results from Swab It!

Blood Drive - In partnership with Canadian Blood Services we held a blood drive on March 27th and 28th prior to the Easter long weekend. Laboratory Technologists are a key part of Transfusion Medicine so we know how important blood donation is. We felt it was a perfect time to hold a blood drive during our Med Lab Week for this reason. A "What's Your Type" blood clinic was set up on the Wednesday to allow students and staff to find out their blood type or ask more questions about the donation process. In the two days we had 38 students donate blood, which helped CBS top their goals for the week!

I truly believe our advocacy efforts helped get other non-laboratory professionals excited and interested in our profession. Hopefully this might inspire you to do something great for National Med Lab Week! Check out ourfocusisyou.ca or nmlw.csmls.org, if you're a member, to spread your advocacy message so Laboratory Professionals can get the attention we deserve.

-K