Dear sir,

I am a medical laboratory technologist who has been employed at the Bulkley Valley District Hospital for 20 years.

I am writing in response to the front page article about microbiology being shipped off to central hub, and how the NHA claims no effect on the front line for patients.

The loss of microbiology to our community and hospital is huge. Microbiology is a basic lab function that has always been available here, and historically in most rural laboratories.

The microbiology department processes samples to culture bacteria. This process requires an incubation of 12-14 hours to get a preliminary result and, depending on the specimen, it can take 48 hours to five days to complete all tests and finalize a negative result.

The NHA claims it has no effect on the patients and there will be “same day transportation”. Reality is that couriers in the north are very difficult to obtain going West in the afternoon, and to date nothing has been established for seven day delivery.

Air courier is being looked at and if they use a current airline schedule, samples must be into the local lab by 1 p.m. at the latest to meet a deadline of a 2 p.m. departure.

The sample is then flown to Terrace, delivered to the hospital, and processed. For the patient who has seen the doctor at 2 p.m. and possibly has Strep throat or a bladder infection, this means your specimen will now sit until 1 p.m. the next day, then be delivered to Terrace, a potential delay of 27 hours or more.

For the outpatient waiting to know if they should start antibiotics, this is an inconvenience, and possibly more people will be treated as the physician may not want the patient to go untreated that long.

But now consider the critically ill child or adult who come into our emergency after 2 p.m. and need a spinal tap to rule out meningitis or blood culture to rule out infection of the blood.

Previous to this the laboratory technologist would be available 24/7 and would promptly process the critical samples. This will no longer be available.

The specimen will then sit until the 2 p.m. flight (or ground courier) the next day. It is true that doctors treat the patient before the culture testing is completed in the case of criticals, but they do rely on the culture results to ensure they have chosen the right course of treatment.

When a critical patient is transferred out of Smithers, the hospital to which they have been transferred to will call our laboratory for bacterial culture reports on these patients, as they need these initial results.

A big concern is these critical samples may not survive en route to Terrace. They can be very fragile and their survival subject to temperature changes.

Steve Raper, NHA director of communications, has said the focus “is on quality results”. Dr. Butcher, NHA vice president medicine, said is not a loss of service but “rather it’s a redesign to deliver the same service in a different way… with a focus on delivering higher quality results and to do that more efficiently”.

Delaying testing and compromising specimen viability is not more efficient or better quality.

Raper also said microbiology testing is often low in volume and one lab processing it familiarizes the workers. Bulkley Valley District Hospital microbiology lab processes over 7,000 samples per year and has retained staff for many years - the least senior has more than 19 years here.

The samples will now be sent to a laboratory (Terrace) which has historically had trouble with recruiting and retaining staff and does not have the years of experience of our staff, and which has been processing a lower volume of microbiology samples than ours.

Our laboratory here currently processes samples from Houston and Dease Lake and surrounding areas. Smithers has all the technology that Mills Memorial hospital has, and a huge resource in a stable staff.

The displaced worker from BVDH lab has not been contacted or in contact with the human resources department. She initiated and found her own “temporary” position with the NHA in a totally different field, and is not able to keep using her laboratory skills at this time.

It is unfortunate that when health care is re-designed and cost cutting done that the facts are twisted and distorted to insinuate the quality of work from the local laboratory is not up to the standard of other labs.

This is not the case: all laboratory technologists are registered with the national Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, and all laboratories are accredited on a regular basis.

The reality is not that the quality will be better, just that a decision has been made and Smithers has not been chosen to be a hub.

Jeanette Saffarek,

Medical Laboratory Technologist,

Smithers.