National Body Urges Three Provinces to Regulate Lab Techs

An interesting article by MSN on Health news:
http://healthandfitness.sympatico.msn.ca/News/ContentPosting?newsitemid=0444095027&feedname=CP-HEALTH&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True&pagenumber=2
National body urges three provinces to regulate lab technologists
04/03/2009 10:51:00 AMTara Brautigam, THE CANADIAN PRESS ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - Patient safety in three provinces and northern Canada may be at risk because medical laboratory technologists there aren't regulated, a national body warned Wednesday in the wake of Newfoundland and Labrador's botched breast cancer testing scandal.
Kurt Davis, executive director of the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, urged Newfoundland, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and the Territories to introduce professional regulation of lab technologists.
"This is very concerning because employers can basically hire whoever they want," he said at a news conference. "There are no restrictions on who can work in a medical laboratory in the absence of professional regulation.
"There's issues of patient safety, in worker safety, in patient confidentiality."
Davis singled out B.C. for "procrastinating" on a 10-year-old proposal to regulate the profession.
He also called on P.E.I., Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Territories to implement mandatory external accreditation of their medical labs to meet internationally accepted standards.
The laboratory medicine director of the Newfoundland health board at the centre of the faulty tests said she agrees regulation and accreditation are needed.
"Accreditation has certainly been a needed entity in laboratory medicine to ensure standards of practice, competency in training," said Lynn Wade of Eastern Health.
Up to 85 per cent of decisions by physicians are based on medical lab results, according to the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, which represents more than 14,000 medical laboratory technologists across Canada.
Davis's call for action came a day after the release of a public inquiry report that found glaring errors at the St. John's lab that processed hundreds of botched breast cancer tests in Newfoundland.
Quality control at that lab was "so little and so haphazard as to be non-existent," provincial Supreme Court Justice Margaret Cameron wrote in a 495-page report.
"We are concerned that similar situations exist but have not erupted in this fashion across Canada," Davis said, citing cutbacks to medical lab sciences across the country in the 1990s.
Cameron issued 60 recommendations that, among other things, call for more training for clinicians, improved record-keeping and mandatory continuing education for laboratory technologists.
She has asked the Newfoundland government to report on the status of her recommendations by March 31, 2010.
The inquiry was launched in 2007 to probe how at least 386 men and women had their breast cancer tests botched.
The tests were intended to determine the most appropriate course of treatment.
At least 108 patients whose tests were misread have died in what is the province's biggest public health failure. But it will likely never be known how many of them, if any, died as a result of missing out on potentially life-saving treatment.