What is a Clinical Laboratory Like at a Hospital?

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Working Behind the Scenes

The medical technologist is the invisible part of a hospital team. Those blood tests and urine and stool samples are whisked away to the clinical laboratory where they are examined by a skilled technician for identification of blood type, anomalies in blood work, infections or bacterial cultures. They determine the health of the patient in terms of diagnosis, treatment and the prevention of diseases.

Hospital laboratories are generally divided into two sections, anatomic pathology and clinical pathology. Anatomic pathology consists of histopathology, cytopathology, and electron microscopy. Clinical pathology includes clinical microbiology, clinical chemistry, hematology, genetics and reproductive biology.

Academically, each unit of clinical laboratory is studied as a separate course. After completing their pre-requisites, students devote seven months in course work pertaining to laboratory studies, with an additional seventeen weeks in clinical rotation.

What Your Blood Tests Tell the Medical Technologist

The unit you are assigned to in a clinical laboratory depends on the type of course work you covered in your formal academic training. One unit of the laboratory is the blood bank. Not only is the type of blood identified, but the RH factor. For expectant mothers with a negative RH factor, this blood test can be a critical part of saving the baby’s life. If the father has a positive RH factor, which is then passed on to the infant and into the mother’s bloodline, the mother’s immune system can actually begin attacking the fetus, causing sometimes fatal consequences, especially in later pregnancies. Detected early enough, the mother is given a drug that will prevent their bodies from harming the baby.

In the blood bank laboratory, the technologist also cross-matches blood types to determine the donor compatibility with the patient in need of transfusion. This means checking the patient’s blood for certain proteins that may react adversely to a blood transfusion. If anti-bodies are present, the sample is sent to another department of blood bank services for investigation.

Another branch of blood work is hematology. Hematology consists of a series of tests that break down the cell count into white and red cell count, hemoglobin and platelets, among other tests. If the results are markedly abnormal or deviate sharply from recent patient history, the medical doctor is contacted immediately. The Complete Blood Count or CBC can alert the physician to infections, reactions to chemotherapy, the inability to clot properly or other medical concerns.

Other Clinical Laboratory Units

Approximately eighty percent of all medical decisions are based on the results that the clinical laboratory provides.

The medical technologist must have extremely good eyesight and strong powers of observation. When working in urinalysis, the technologist studies urine and stool samples for evidence of urinary tract infections. If the criteria are met for the presence of white cell enzymes, red cells, turbidity, proteins or bacteria, the sample is sent to the microbiology unit.

The microbiology unit concerns itself with the detection and identification of infection causing bacteria. To determine the presence and strength of harmful bacteria, cultures are created using samples from urine, stool and throat swabs. Along with urinary tract infections, some of the most common bacterial infections that are looked for are food poisoning, vaginal colonizations that can affect the normal health of unborn babies, and colonizations that are located in the catheters and tracheas that are connected to the patient.

The chemistry unit is the most automated of all the departments. It relies primarily on highly technical instruments that include a large number of analyzers. Enormous care is taken with the analyzers to ensure they function properly at all times. Chemical analysis is the most time consuming and exacting of the laboratory functions.

Most clinical laboratories are open twenty-four hours of the day, every day of the week, which means the laboratory technologist works in shifts. The laboratory is the behind the scenes part of the medical profession, the part where some of the most important decisions are made for the diagnosis and treatment of the patient.