Innovative Student Recruitment to MLS and MLT 
Programs

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I'm going to turn it over to our OneLab Network lead, Alicia Branch, to introduce our 
next speakers. Alicia?
Thank you, Blanche. Again. 
I'll read the CDC external presenter disclaimer and then introduce our final speakers for 
today, Dr. Nathan Johnson and Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Bird.
Slide decks may contain presentation material from panelists, not affiliated with CDC.
Presentation content from external panelists may not necessarily reflect CDCs official 
position on the topics covered.
Next slide, please.
Doctor Nathan Johnson is the Chair of the Laboratory Science Department in the College 
of Health Professions at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, or UAMS.
In this role, he also functions as professor and program director of the Medical 
Laboratory Science Program.
He serves on the National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Scientists Board of 
Directors, and it is a former ASCP Board of Directors member.
Dr. Johnson retired from the United States Air Force with the rank of Colonel and is 
professionally certified in multiple clinical and administrative areas.
Our next presenter is Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Bird.
She's an assistant professor at UAMS in Little Rock, Arkansas. She is also, as I stated, a 
Lieutenant Colonel in the Arkansas Air National Guard and has served her country for 28 years.
She started her laboratory civilian career near Omaha, Nebraska, after graduating from the 
University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Colonel Bird has served as the primary hematology faculty member for UAMS for three 
years. As such, she has taught more than 500 students and increased ASCP MLS hematology 
scores by 10%. Her experience allows her to interact with the laboratory professionals from 
over from all over the world. She's passionate about increasing quantity and quality for the 
medical laboratory workforce and encouraging the next generation of students to consider 
entering the profession. Specifically, Colonel Bird has coordinated relationships with 
face-to-face visits with multiple high schools, MLT programs, and military bases.
Our last speakers for today are Dr. Nathan Johnson and Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca 
Beard.
Oh, BIRD, I'm sorry.
Well, it's very good to be here and we are very excited to be here and we're looking 
forward to hearing your feedback.
And with that, I will start our presentation.
First of all, I would like to just show you a picture of UAMS in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It's a very beautiful campus and we are in the in the heart of all things medical in the 
state of Arkansas.
We have an on-campus program.
We're actually the oldest on-campus program in the United States.
We're 106 years old this year.
We have a very large online MLT-to-MLS bridge program, and we have a cytotechnology 
program.
If anyone is interested in any of those, please feel free to contact me later and I'd be 
happy to share with you information.
A disclaimer on our part: Everything that we're going to say today does not reflect any 
professional organization, UAMS, college, etc.
We're going to share with you some ideas that may be challenging but we are very 
passionate about it.
So again, we're very excited.
So, our objectives:1. We want to discuss the current state of formal medical laboratory 
education in the United States and how it's impacting clinical laboratories.
2. We want to compare and contrast the current efforts to recruit more students into 
the medical laboratory profession.
And 3. We want to discuss future strategies that individuals and groups may employ to 
recruit students in the medical laboratory profession.
And that's really what this presentation is all about, how to get more graduates to you, 
more medical laboratory professionals.
First, I would like to acknowledge our faculty and staff at UAMS.
They are a true joy to work with and they allow me to do the things like this and Mrs. 
Bird to do the things like we're going to talk to you about today.
They are just fantastic.
And again, just like to thank them.
Also like to thank my administration.
They are the most supportive administration that you could ever imagine.
And just like you in your clinical laboratory career, you have to have 
supportive administration to be successful.
We do too and our administration is just super.
I'd like to share with you just a little bit about where I come from.
I'm from north Louisiana, from a very rural town called SpringHill.
I joined the Army National Guard, went to college, and then I joined the Air Force and I 
served for about 28 years all over the United States. And end up my travels,
I really had a feel that clinical laboratories are so important, but the personnel that flow 
into those clinical laboratories are the most important.
And I started seeing 10, 15, 20 years ago, signs of some shortages.
And it really got me to thinking what could I do after my military career to help with 
that?
And in 2017, I came to UAMS, and it's been one of the biggest blessings of my life and 
we've been able to help a lot of individuals.
And so that's what our goal is today.
Just share some of that information and hopefully give you some thoughts and some 
ideas where you can join us in the efforts that we have.
So first of all, I'd like to just share with you a little bit.
From 20,000 feet, the big picture.
Clinical laboratories in the United States must hire personnel that meet CLIA 
requirements that makes sense.
If you're in a state that requires licensure, you have to meet those requirements.
And you might be in a system, for example, the Department of Defense requires 
individuals to be certified if they're going to work for them.
And so, you have to meet all three of those.
Now, in general, students who graduate from a NAACLS-accredited program, who are 
also credentialed and certified meet those requirements.
And they are often preferred due to the standardization of training, the positive impact 
that they can have on patient safety, and then just the overall professionalism.
I know at UAMS we take a great deal of pride in instilling that professional spirit, that 
spirit to give back, to be part of the profession.
And so, our graduates and graduates from other NAACLS programs from around the 
country should have that.
However, many labs can't fill their open positions right now with personnel who are 
NAACLS trained and certified because there's just not enough of them.
So, what happens next? To meet the minimum CLIA requirements.
Labs have been forced, and I use that term intentionally, "forced," to hire individuals 
who meet the CLIA minimum requirements of education and training and they commit to 
training them on the job.
In theory, this is an OK practice in states that do not require licensure.
However, there's some issues surrounding this.
1. Prior education does not always prepare someone for an entry-level 
laboratory position.
And 2. Short-staffed laboratories are often in no position to train effectively.
So, although the intent may be good, in practice the results are not always what we 
want, and I use this example that someone I know shared with me.
She was working the night shift and there was an individual working the blood bank solo 
that had been hired from industry who had a chemistry degree and the individual said, what is 
this word, hemolysis, and why is it important now?
This individual had been working in the clinical laboratory for about three months at 
that point.
Just an example to show you how someone can be in the clinical laboratory 
environment but still not exactly know everything that they need to know.
So, I'd like to talk a little bit about what's the cause and ask some just general questions.
Do medical laboratory science programs need to work harder?
That's a question that I get all the time.
And I thought that if the clinical laboratory and medical laboratory training programs 
could just pump out more students, we would solve our problem.
And I think by the end of this presentation, you'll see that although we can help, we're 
not the sole reason for the shortage.
The second question, should clinical labs refuse to hire via alternate pathways?
Now, I already mentioned that labs to be able to remain open were forced to hire 
sometimes individuals who may not have the ideal education and training.
So that's not something that I would be an advocate for, and we'll talk a little bit more 
about that.
Do our professional societies need to do more to attract and recruit new talent in the 
medical laboratory field?
Yes, of course.
But they are not alone.
Because you as the medical laboratory professionals who make up those professional 
societies are the ones where really, we're going to make some traction.
And so that's going to be something we'll also talk about.
I'd like to just briefly mention the history of medical laboratory training in the United 
States.
Sometimes when I talk to very young medical laboratory professionals, they really have 
no idea where we started from.
And as I mentioned before, UAMS is the oldest laboratory training program in the 
country, 106 years old.
So do the math.
We started in 1918 right about the end of the First World War, and we had individuals 
coming back from the European theater where they had seen our European partners combine 
microbiology and chemistry together into one unit that worked effectively together.
Fast-forward a few more years, we throw in hematology, we throw in blood bank and 
other areas, and we have the modern clinical laboratory.
Over the next 30, 40, 50 years with rapid growth and infusion of money from insurance 
and the government and so forth.
And the labs were making money, and we really grew.
And the laboratory training programs grew as well.
So, we started from next to nothing and then we grew pretty big.
However, when some of the money stopped coming in and we became more expensive, 
some individuals who were decision-makers decided we're going to shut down some of these 
programs.
We're going to save some money.
We're going to get those individuals from somewhere else, or we're going to make it 
someone else's problem.
And that is where we really started to see a decline in the number of clinical laboratory 
training programs.
If some of you have been in the field for 20-30 years, you'll remember hospital programs 
all across the United States started shutting down.
And we still have some hospital programs still remaining out there, but we used to have 
a lot more of them and that has really been a huge contributor to our shortfall.
Now over the past 20 years or so, we've kind of stabilized.
We still have some hospital-based programs, and we have a good number of MLT 
programs which do a great job especially covering regional areas and then we have some 
university, and college-based programs.
And so those together are really what are forming the core of our NAACLS-based 
training programs.
Now at UAMS, we developed a model, a workforce professional development model,
where we look at the supply ofmedical laboratory professionals who are entering the 
field both from traditional and nontraditional ways.
The impact of variables such as automation, the increase in productivity that that can 
provide, the natural turnover and just the unnatural turnover, the lack of retention, and we get 
an estimate of what our future need is.
And before when I said that clinical laboratory training programs are not the sole cause 
of our shortage.
Actually, if you take all of our NAACLS-accredited programs right now and they all 
produced at their maximum, not one empty seat, we would produce between 7,000 and 8,000 
graduates a year.
However, our model shows that the need is about 16,000+ new graduates a year.
So, each year we're seeing a delta of about 9000.
If you just saw the 2002 ASCP vacancy survey, you'll see numbers very similar to this 
with vacancy rates in some areas up to 18-19%.
And so, this is no surprise, but it does show us why there are vacancies out there and 
why we cannot fill all of those vacancies with graduates from where we might like to fill them 
from, which is NAACLS-accredited programs.
So, if you were to take our workforce and compare it to a test tube, we're a little over 
half full and it's filled with NACCLS trained personnel, and the other half is either not filled or 
filled with non-NAACLS-trained personnel.
So how bad is it out there?
And we get feedback all the time.
We hear that. We know it's bad.
I like to look at things around my area.
I'm in the center of Arkansas.
I'm from Louisiana.
I spent a great deal of time in Mississippi in my career.
So, I like to look at these three states.
So overall, we account for only about 3% of the population of the United States, but we 
account for almost 7% of the rural population of the United States and we're about 38% rural 
as compared to 19% nationally.
We account for only about 6% of the hospitals.
There are 233 hospitals in these three states, and we have 34 training programs.
Now these 233 hospitals on average their clinical labs report about three open 
positions.
Some of these labs are very small and some of them are bigger, but on average about 
three vacancies at any given time.
And so, at any given time, that's 700 vacancies.
Now we have more medical training, medical laboratory training programs per capita 
than the rest of the United States in general.
And so, we're actually in a pretty good spot, but we are nowhere near meeting the 
needs in our general area.
And even if you take the urban areas in this area for example in Little Rock, we have a 
really good situation.
We have two really good medical laboratory science training programs, and we have 
two really good MLT training programs within the vicinity.
And we still can't meet the need just in our very close geographic area.
So, all that to say is it really doesn't matter where you're at.
There are issues in most parts of the country.
So, I've painted kind of a dystopian picture of clinical laboratories moving forward and I 
don't want to be too negative, but I do want to point out that I believe that this situation is 
non-sustainable.
There are just not enough graduates to meet the needs.
There are four possible paths that we can go to from here and this is the need for 
innovation.
1. Which I do not like this idea, but it's to reduce the standard so personnel needs are 
met.
I'm not a fan of reducing standards, whether they be CLIA or if you're in a state that has 
licensure, removing that licensure.
I don't think that's the answer 2. Is to replace the current technology with new 
technology and that is always something that we should consider, reducing the number of 
personnel that are needed to do the same or equivalent type of job.
3. Increase in house training is the third option. That in-house training could be a 
hospital-based program for example.
It could be taking those individuals who are already hired and working in the labs who 
have not been formally trained and give them some formal training.
That is an innovative way that many programs around the country are helping 
individuals. For example, get categorical certification, which can be a gateway to future 
certification as well, and also increasing the graduates of traditional programs.
And that is something that all program directors like myself should be thinking about as 
well.
But is any of this new?
I like to go back to this article from September of 1952, so that is 72 years ago, if my 
math is right, from the American Journal of Clinical Pathology.
It's very interesting.
I recommend that you go back and read this in its entirety, but I have a quote that I'd 
like to read—
"Some ideas on the possibilities for future classification, training, and standards of 
medical technologists, which is what they were called then, expressed with the hope that a 
practical solution on the present shortage of medical technologies may be reached."
Now, at that time in 1952, we had 15,000 practicing medical technologists and we 
graduated about 2,000 a year.
So different times, different scenario, but still there was a shortage.
Now, I know you're all familiar with the Laboratory Workforce Coalition, which is an 
exciting new opportunity for us.
And I want to make sure that I foot stomp this.
As professionals, we need to encourage our societies who join that coalition to keep the 
momentum going.
Cannot let that stop.
But in June of 2000, we had representatives from 12 different laboratory organizations 
and two governmental agencies met in Chicago to talk about the shortage of clinical laboratory 
personnel.
So again, this is not new.
The fact that we're not graduating enough students right now also has some other 
implications.
And of all the slides that I'm going to talk about today, this one may be the most 
important.
Last year, Dr. Maribeth Flaws, who was then the NAACLS president, wrote an article 
which I thought was about the best thing I had seen in many, many years.
And it was about the impact of having too few NAACLS, MLT, and MLS graduates and 
what it's going to mean and the call for action.
And so, the premise of her article was that having too few graduates could result in 
three things.
1. Is an increase in nonaccredited programs and we're seeing that.
You will see that. With the shortage that we're seeing, you're going to see 
some proprietary schools pop up.
that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad, but you don't know about the 
standardization and the quality.
2. You see an increase in on-the-job-trained personnel.
Now both of those situations can work but they're not optimal and it's not what we 
would hope to see.
3. And the third outcome is an increase in nontraditional education and certification 
pathways. Like I mentioned, helping individuals who are already hired and working in labs get 
alternate certifications or categorical certification, etc.
And that might be the best-case scenario, but the culmination of all this could be the 
evaluation of accreditation certification.
Because if individuals who are entering the workforce see that they have a different 
path that may not include our traditional path that we believe is best,
going through a NAACLS-accredited program, you may see students choose not to do 
that.
And with that you'd see a decrease in students, programs closing potentially, and 
ultimately a dilution in professionalism and most importantly our professional identity.
So, who has all the answers?
I've laid out a bunch of stuff.
I don't have all the answers, but I like to look to those that do and that's the laboratory.
So, what are the labs telling us?
Well, our labs are telling us that they need more staff.
They have no real plan to get these staff, most of them now.
Now there are a few out there doing some really incredible things to make it work, and 
we'll talk a little bit more about that later.
But all of them say this,
"Could you please send me several of your new graduates?
And I'd like them yesterday."
And so, the desire to have graduates from programs like ours at UAMS and NAACLS accredited programs 
is still great. It's never been more.
And so, we had really have this imbalance going on.
Now, not too long ago on one of the big lab Facebook pages, there was a question that 
was asked, and it was asked, is your lab short-staffed?
And interestingly enough and not surprisingly, 95% of rural labs says that their labs are 
very much understaffed, 88% of urban and suburban labs said their labs were understaffed, and 
no respondents said their lab was overstaffed.
So again, we get the picture that the labs are working hard, and we need more 
individuals and that's even with the other individuals working in the lab side-by-side.
So, to kind of sum up the current situation in my mind, there's very little doubt that in 
the short term the workforce shortage is going to continue to occur.
Where is this workforce going to come from that we need?
Hopefully, some will come from an increase in formal lab training programs.
And if I haven't mentioned it before, if any of you on this call or you hear this later are 
interested in starting a program or you're interested in being a faculty somewhere, please send 
me an email.
Not that I will hire you, but I will try my best to connect you with some place 
somewhere that will really use your talent.
Now we could see possibly, like I mentioned before, an increase in non-NAACLS 
programs, nontraditional path to meet CLIA requirements, shifting nonclinical roles to 
nontechnical staff which would be a smart thing to do.
And we've seen many labs importing technical staff from other countries which 
they've been very successful at doing that.
And sometimes I hear the idea that well we'll just use travel techs to meet our shortfall 
and you can do that in the short term.
But in the long term it really does nothing to help with the shortage of individuals who 
can do high complexity testing because you're really just moving the chairs around on the 
shipboard.
So, we really need to think about ways that we can add new personnel, not just shuffle 
them around.
At UAMS, we have a very large MLT-to-MLS bridge program and we're helping a lot of 
individuals get better at what they do, but we're in in that case we are not adding more 
personnel to the workforce. And so, although it's a great thing that we're doing, it's, again, it's 
not helping shortage and whenever you see the number of individuals who are taking their MLS 
exam and passing, just know that about 20% of those individuals are coming from the MLT 
ranks.
They were already certified laboratory professionals and they're just getting another 
certification.
So, we need more programs and I think they need to be strategically placed.
And I use this,
for example, in California, we have a state
where MLS's on average are about 50+ years old, but there's only 11 NAACLS MLS 
program and five NAACLS-accredited MLT programs for a total of 16.
So, you have 0.4 programs for every 1,000,000 population.
Not enough.
United States average is 1.5 programs per million.
Arkansas, where I live, is 2.7, and I visited North Dakota last year.
They have five programs for one million.
So, you see, there's a lot of variability.
But the need for medical laboratory professionals is essentially maybe not exactly the 
same everywhere, but the need is definitely evident everywhere.
So, what can we do?
And we're going to spend just a little bit of time talking about what individuals can do, 
some innovative ways that we can possibly help with this shortage.
We're going to talk about it from the perspective of the professional organization, 
medical laboratory training programs, universities and colleges, hospitals, labs, and then us as 
medical laboratory professionals.
So, what can professional organizations do?
We point a lot of fingers at the organizations and say they need to do this; they need to 
do that.
So, let's talk about that.
They can advocate for the profession at all levels, and I think they do a great job at that.
They can provide support for medical laboratory educators and students, and I think 
they're doing well with that as well.
They can provide structure for those of us who want to volunteer, and we need a lot 
more volunteers.
They can serve as an information resource hub for individuals who are interested in the 
profession.
So you go on Google, you want to find out how to be a medical laboratory professional.
They can help there.
They can provide data and analysis to support the growth of programs.
Where do we need these programs?
And they can also support alternate pathways to help alleviate the shortages while at 
the same time maintaining professional standards.
So what are some examples and what are some things some of the professional 
organizations are doing now?
I just have a couple of examples.
The ASCP is providing scholarships and grants to medical laboratory educators and 
students, and we're greatly appreciative of that.
ASCLS is providing specialized conferences, such as CLEC for laboratory educators and 
tailoring message boards who are specific for educators.
NAACLS is providing individualized help for hospitals or educational institutions that 
want to start an accredited program.
And again, any of you that want to start a program, please let me know.
I will make that connection.
All right. So, what can MLS and MLT programs do?
1. Fill every seat.
And this is harder than you might think.
When I said earlier that we have a capacity of about 7,500 students per year, I don't 
know what percentage of that 7,500 is filled every year, but it's not near 100%.
So, we have a lot of work to do to fill every current training seat.
That's where you as medical laboratory professionals can help because we know that 
one of the greatest predictors of someone entering the field is knowing someone, a relative or 
a friend who has already been in the field.
And for those current programs, expanding program capacity.
At UAMS, we have the capacity for 30 students a year in our own campus program.
Could it be 40, could it be 50, could it be 60?
I don't know, but maybe. We need to grow new faculty.
Right now there is a shortage of faculty all over the United States.
So, for these 450 some-odd MLT and MLS programs, when there's a vacancy for a full-time position, 
many times it's hard to fill and a lot of these vacancies are hard to fill because it's 
a regional issue.
You may not want to move somewhere.
Right now, in Arkansas, we have an MLT program that's ready to stand up.
They've been funded, they have new equipment, they have everything.
They don't have somebody to teach the program, to be the program director, and it's in 
a beautiful spot.
If you would like to get connected, I will make that connection for you.
Programs can share resources with other programs, not act as they're in a silo and help 
each other.
And for the most part, programs do that. And again, help start new programs because 
we need them.
Here's an example of what an MLT program could do.
And I recently visited a program, and I was so impressed, but they had a very supportive 
administration, which is where success starts, and they had an open dialogue with the hospitals 
in the area and they doubled their seat capacity exactly like what I mentioned.
They started offering part-time classes to students in their area and they made their 
instrumentation very similar to what their students would see in the hospital setting as much as 
you can in an MLT program.
And they also realized that they needed to do a better job with their micro training.
And so they brought some of that training in house and made a really robust micro 
simulation experience for those students and it was just fantastic.
If you ever have a chance to go out to Weber State University, they have the most 
incredible simulation clinic and lab that is just amazing and I know they're very proud to show 
that off.
So, if you ever get a chance, see that because it's an example of how you can do it right, 
do right by your students, and maybe overcome some of the issues.We have a shortage of 
micro clinical affiliates all over right now.
Another example of what an online MLT program can do, and I'll mention a couple of 
them later, is to provide access to a high-quality medical laboratory training program where 
there's no MLT program in the area.
If you look at the distribution of MLT and MLS training programs in the country, there 
are wide swaths of the country where there's nothing. In Arkansas, in northwest Arkansas, a 
metro area of about a million people,
there's no laboratory training program anywhere near there.
We have some clinical affiliates there and we do our best to help them.
But the point is you can train as a medical laboratory technician and do traditional 
clinicals and do everything that you need to be, even though there's no MLT program within 50-
100 miles of you.
So, what can MLS programs do?
We can target areas of need and provide novel alternative methods of delivery.
If you can't have a student in your class for a lecture, you can do it remotely.
We can help establish MLT programs, and that's something that we,
have a passion of doing at UAMS and we can target areas that have an excess of MLS 
applicants for training opportunities.
There are parts of this country where we have individuals who want to get into an MLS 
program or an MLT program and they just can't.
And so, reaching out to those areas and saying we can help, and we do that and 
other programs, I know do that as well.
Universities and colleges can help. They can help support current programs. They can 
start new programs.
If all of our colleges around the country had a pre-MLS track, it would be great.
And for those colleges that do, it's very successful.
They can provide guidance for students who are interested in a career in medical 
laboratory science and encourage visits from existing programs.
We reach out to colleges sometime and they, you know, are not too excited for us to 
come on campus because they think that we may steal some of their students or so forth.
But really getting great working relationships with them is just so important.
And universities can also promote the fact that they have an affiliation agreement with 
us.
And in some ways these colleges can actually grow by doing this type of work.
And the last thing they can do is to identify target majors and ensure they know about 
the laboratory profession.
Getting into a class in their freshman year of college or sophomore year of college and 
saying this is an option, because I know that many of you who are attending today, you didn't 
know what you wanted to be your freshman or sophomore year of college.
I didn't declare that I was then a medical technology major until I was going into my 
junior year.
And so, I we do know that there are those out there like that.
So, what can hospitals do?
Hospitals can support the growth of new hospital-based programs. Regionally,
like I mentioned before, there are so many areas of need, and we absolutely need new 
hospital-based programs and there's some great examples out there of hospital systems that 
are doing that now because they've realized that they have to do that to attract talent. 
Providing support and time to transition
those who they've hired, they're in a non-licensure state to get that categorical 
certification, to take classes, to do the things that that you need to do to be a professional and 
get that certification.
And finally, to promote professionalism, to allow laboratory staff to attend professional 
meetings, education, training, etc.
And understanding that we are professionals and that we do need to be fertilized and 
we need to grow.
And that's just part of being a professional.
So what are some examples of what you can do?
Start a program, start it yesterday, get it going and we'll, we'll provide the help.
And then once you do it, help someone else start a program.
Because again, that's going to be a great way that we're going to be able to make some 
positive changes.
So, what can individual labs do. Now we're getting at a more granular level.
There's about 250 NAACLS MLS programs. Volunteer to be a clinical site.
I know sometimes it can seem painful, but if we don't have clinical sites, we don't have 
programs.
Now this is something I want you all to listen to because I always hear "I wish students 
would come," here, this or that or whatever.
Students in medical laboratory training programs are generally not that well off.
In other words, they're poor and they would love financial help. Giving them a bonus 
later to move to your area, which they know nothing about,
it's kind of difficult when there's so many jobs to choose from.
But I promise you, if you come to a program like mine or similar programs when 
students are in their very first semester and say, you know what, we'll help you pay for your 
tuition.
Not even pay for it, just help you pay for your tuition if you'll come and work for us.
So front loading that bonus with the appropriate payback and so forth, it's a way to lock 
in these students and it's a great way to get students.
If any of you are interested in that, you shoot me an email and I'll be happy to help you 
with that.
And finally help us find students.
If you know somebody maybe they don't know where to go for a program, contact me.
I don't care where they're at in the country.
I will connect them with a program that's near them.
We can help get them into a program.
Similarly, with MLT programs, please be a clinical site for them, help connect those 
students.
If you want an MLT program in your area, and you don't have it,
look to the online MLT programs.
Weber State has a fantastic one.
North Ark here in Arkansas has one.
There are there are plenty of them out there and they're all more than willing to help.
Now with that, I am going to turn it over to Ms. Rebecca Bird.
She's passionate about getting out in the schools and doing the things that she's going 
to talk about.
And so, I appreciate you paying close attention to her.
Hello, everyone. Thank you, Dr. Johnson, and Happy Lab Week. So, this is an amazing 
opportunity. Go ahead and go to the next slide, Dr. Johnson. All right.
So, I appreciate this opportunity to share with you examples of what labs can do as well 
as some of the simple things that I have been blessed to do because I do have an out-of-the-box 
leader like Dr. Johnson here at UAMS.
So, you guys can volunteer to take on more than the usual number of students, 
especially in areas of need such as micro.
Heard a very novel recommendation at the recent Arkansas State meeting where he 
mentioned why not take students on alternate shifts, right? When they graduate, they're 
already on a day shift and so they think they can graduate and get a day shift.
Well, why not have them train on other shifts?
Why not have them train on evenings or nights?
Could that actually help us get more students in clinicals?
You know, wow, like that could do some awesome blood banking because we all know 
that blood bank things happen, right, on the night shift when you're by yourself and you end up 
having something crazy come in.
Identify medical personnel who might make good entry-level medical 
laboratory professionals and help them.
When I first graduated, I actually worked with a person, completely non-lab, but worked 
at the hospital with us.
She cleaned.
That was her job.
She was one of our facilities people, but she had a heart for people, and we actually 
trained her as a phlebotomist, and she was amazing.
So, try to think outside of that box, right?
Next slide, Dr. Johnson, please.
The mailroom model is a great model to look at, especially if you are in one of those 
areas that doesn't have a good training site, right?
There's no MLT program nearby.
There's no MLS program nearby.
Get that high school graduate with great potential, right?
Or find that person that's, you know, currently emptying your trash can that it is really 
great with people and likes people and is interested in medicine.
And then have them get a phlebotomy certification.
Then they get their phlebotomy certification, get them into the lab, train them to do 
specimen processing, work on getting them to a medical lab assistant, get them to the medical 
lab assistant, move them to an online MLT program right.
We just saw some examples, North Ark, Weber State. After that, MLT certification and 
MLT-to-MLS bridge program just like the one here at UAMS. I mean from the age 18 to age 28.
Now they have 10-years of experience working in the lab.
They can get nearly any job.
I've actually seen this model work very, very well in the middle of New Mexico.
I went there.
We have an affiliation agreement with the hospital there because we have a couple of 
our bridge students there, couple graduates, and a couple of new ones who are there and they 
are amazing.
I walked into that lab to visit them.
It's a beautiful place to be, very small area though where you have you know mountains 
and desert together and here, they are growing their own because they don't have any type of 
training program.
There's a close-by medical assistant and phlebotomy program.
So, they utilize those and then they utilize Weber State to get to their MLT and then the 
ones who have the affiliation agreement were utilizing us to get to their MLS, right? 
Opportunities are out there.
We just have to figure out how can we fit these into right where we are.
Next slide, Dr. Johnson.
All right, so what can laboratorians do?
This slide example truly comes from Rex Famitangco. I actually Googled how to say his 
last name.
He was the 2020 Lab Week Hero for ASCP.
So, support your programs, right?
He's a big supporter of programs, but he started multiple programs.
He started a phlebotomy program, a medical lab assistant program, and he started an 
MLT program right where he was. Consider a position as faculty, adjunct faculty.
You can be a non-paid adjunct and just try to get your foot in the door.
We love guest lecturers all the time.
So that's always an opportunity.
And then when paid adjunct faculty open, you can step your way into that and do a little 
more.
And then when faculty open, you might have to move to a new location.
But consider helping out or consider growing a program right where you are.
Dr. Johnson mentioned here in Arkansas, we have an opportunity, a very beautiful area 
that they've got the program ready and no director, right?
Well, how do we make that happen?
Teach younger and less experienced staff.
That is a great way as well, right?
New experienced staff.
Do you get those CNAs that come around and they're like, hey, maybe I'd be good at 
phlebotomy.
Oh, what is lab?
I've never heard of that.
Right?
I was right there when I went to school as well.
I was a CNA.
Never heard of lab.
Guess where I am now, right?
God opens doors. Promote professionalism.
We have to be professional.
We need to promote our professional organizations when people are being negative 
about them, and they don't see what we're doing in the background.
We probably need to get our organizations a little more in the limelight.
And then helping us to find new students. Good. Move on to the next slide, Sir.
Talk to the high schoolers.
This is a big piece that Dr. Johnson wanted me to capitalize on for you.
So, through a Facebook connection, initially a Facebook connection,
I've actually been going to a spot that has six different high schools filtering into one 
place.
I'm doing it this Thursday.
I will speak to 150 high schoolers on Thursday this week and tell them about medical 
laboratory science.
The last two years that I've done this, out of the 150, maybe one student actually knew 
we existed.
We've gotten our first phone call saying I heard about it at the Saline County Career and 
Technical Center, and so I want to make sure I have all my prerequisites in place.
So that student wasn't ready to start yet because here I'm starting them in high school, 
high school juniors, high school seniors, telling them about it.That technical school actually has 
room to grow.
They could potentially someday be a good spot for a phlebotomy certification or a 
medical lab assistant certification.
Again, right there a room for growth.
We just have to look for those opportunities.
Talking to individuals at the community colleges is also very important and the different 
universities because again, they don't know we exist, right?
They go to that school, and they think, OK, I need to get my degree in biochemistry. 
Every year, I have a student on campus who already has their bachelor's in biochemistry, if not 
one, two, or three that either has a bachelor's in biology, chemistry, biochemistry.
We have nurses that come in, right?
If they didn't know we existed before, they knew what job they wanted.
They just thought that was the route to go because of the school they were at. A 
quarterly shadowing event for interested students.
Any program can do this. The only issue you have to kind of make sure you've worked 
around right is that HIPAA issue.
They need to have their HIPAA training, but you can get that usually before they come.
A one-day event is enough to interest a student in what we do.
It doesn't take much. Make a personal connection with different programs and assist in 
making student connections with those programs.
I guarantee next year and the year after those students that I saw at the high school 
level are going to come in and I've even taken advantage of the fact that my daughter is in 8th 
grade.
I am now connected to the junior high for the first time, where I did presentations for 
roughly 60 junior highers taking a career development class.
So, I've now connected with her.
I'm going to try to do that once or twice a year to try to get more students interested in 
what we do.
So, with that, I noticed there are definitely some questions we need to address in the 
chat.
Alicia, do we want to let people unmute, or do you want to read questions from the 
chat?
I'll read them for you.
OK. We'll take a few minutes to answer as many questions as possible.
If we don't get to answer your question today, we'll do our best to respond via email if 
your question was not submitted anonymously.
If you have questions after today, please email the OneLab inbox at OneLab@cdc.gov.
So, let's get to the first one.
She says reduce standards to what?
Currently, the CLIA lab compliance is all you need is a high school diploma to perform 
moderate complexity testing.
Yeah, so my point was I was not an advocate of reducing standards.
But naturally, if you don't have enough throughput of what you need, eventually that 
will happen.
And that's really the scary part because if we don't do something, something will be 
done to us.
And my fear is that it would be reduced standards.
And so, for example, you mentioned you need a high school education to do moderate 
complexity testing.
Maybe in the future it would be you need a high school education to do high complexity 
testing, or to be a technical supervisor, or to be a general supervisor, etc.
Right.
This person wants to know, does NAACLES-accredited pathways exist for post doctorate 
or master's STEM students looking to make a career change?
There are NAACLS programs there,
if you have a graduate degree that you can go through to get your MLS or other types of 
education. You can go to the NAACLS website and there's a really nice program finder function 
that you can use to help with that.
OK. And one other thing I will add, most traditional medical laboratory science programs 
and others I assume will allow individuals who have graduate degrees to go through their 
program.
We've had several with PhDs go through our program and it's not uncommon for 
individuals to have a master’s degree to go through our program.
I like the idea of increasing MLS enrollment at the tertiary level.
However, will they be guaranteed an internship spot?
And then it was like a second part to the question is can colleges have an internship be a 
part of the curriculum to complete as a graduation requirement?
So, there are colleges that will you know include that in a four-year degree. That used to 
be more common. You would have a three plus one type of program where the colleges would 
partner with the hospital in their senior year and so forth.
The question about the guaranteed internship.
When I mentioned that you know, for example, there are plenty of programs out there 
that have empty seats,
In most cases that means they're empty internship slots available as well too.
And I can say that definitely here at UAMS we generally have several empty seats each 
year and it goes unfilled.
And that's a shame because we know the need.
[Bird] Yes, we actually have a lot of internship sites request our students and we can't fill 
their sites because we can't fill all of our slots.
We have slots for 30 and we have not graduated 30 in the last four years since I've been 
here, so we would love to fill all those slots.
We do have students from other states who have trouble getting internships where 
they're located that come here just so that they can finish a program and get the internship and 
get into the lab.
Yeah, the best example for that is California, where there are a tremendous number of 
individuals who would like to go to a training program.
There's, like I mentioned, there's 0.4 training programs per million.
There's just not enough.
And so, students from California routinely will travel outside the state to go to a training 
program somewhere else and then hopefully meet the requirements to go back to California to 
practice.Or they don't return to California. <laughs>
Or they don't. Sometimes they don't.
Don't get me wrong, they send us awesome people.
We try to keep them.Our experience is that this is for when we talk about growing 
programs,
the students from California have been amazing.
This person wants to know how can we fill every seat working on getting students to our 
program?
Also, how do we manage to train when we don't have enough faculty?
That is the million-dollar question.
The students who many of us are targeting, they don't know about us, and they don't 
know that they need to be with us and so many times they're not on campuses.
When we talk about innovations, there was recently a MLT program that I visited that 
was marketing directly to Walmart and they had a social media campaign which they could do 
that, and they had tremendous luck with that.
And so that's something that you know different things, that's thinking outside the box 
in a way that we've never thought about before.
Traditionally we go to campuses.
Right now, you go to campuses and have an open house and you may have one or two 
or three students if you're lucky show up.
And so, it's a problem, and we do need to think about that, not having enough faculty.
Another issue that we have nationally is there's no standardization in the number of 
faculty we have.
We have some programs that will teach 20 students with one faculty, and you may have 
four faculty at another program teaching 18.
So, faculty can be overworked, they can be burned out,
and so forth as well, too.
The recruitment of students though is very difficult.
And we're not here saying that we're experts on that because we think about that every 
day.
I just returned from a recruiting trip yesterday trying to help fill our class.
So, one of the pieces that I have done with those high schoolers is you walk into a high 
school classroom and it's I want to be a doctor, I want to be a nurse.
And so, I stand there, and I go, well, how are you going to become a doctor?
What is your first degree going to be?
And they look at you like what?
Because they don't realize, oh, I've got to figure out I can't just go to school and be a 
doctor, right?
So, then I highly recommend look at medical lab science.
This is how you diagnose your patients.
Maybe this should be your steppingstone, because you can get a job that pays decently 
with your bachelor's degree if you don't want to be a nurse.
I'm not going to tell you not to be a nurse, but I'm going to tell you that if you want to 
route other than nursing, come to the lab.
Start with the lab and let that be your steppingstone.
And I guarantee that some of those students I talked to, they're going to be right in our 
lab.
I can't tell you how many of them came up to me afterwards and thanked me for 
coming to visit them.
So, it's been amazing.
I can't wait to see us, right?
They're high school juniors and seniors, so they've got to get like three years of college 
before they get to me.
But we will see them soon.
Someone wants to know if, I'm assuming, the MLT program, if the director position is 
remote.
So, I am aware that there are some programs that can have a remote director. For a 
new start program.
It's probably not the best idea, that's just my opinion.
The program director generally has to have three years of educational experience and 
Rebecca mentioned before about volunteering with the academic institution as a volunteer 
adjunct or just getting your foot in the door.
Some of that also is just getting some educational experience so that you can qualify for 
being a program director.
But if anybody is interested in making that connection with the program in Arkansas 
that's looking for someone, I would be happy to pass that information on to whoever is 
interested.
You can just email me.
And we'll probably end up sharing.
This person will probably need to actually reach out to you as well, because they want 
to know if you could share more details about the presentation for high schoolers because 
they're actually interested in having the same type of discussion.
Yeah, feel free to email me and I can even share with you what I share and I have no 
problem sharing.
So I can definitely do that.
Depends on how long your presentation needs to be.
I am working on some more hands-on stuff but we're not doing a whole lot of hands-on 
except to hand them a fidget when I walk in the door <laughter> because they need to do 
something.
This is another question from the same person.
What can they do to best prepare and build themselves to be able to teach at a local 
MLT program.
Well, that's a great question.
Number one, you have to have a desire and without that you know you're just not it's 
not going to work for you.
But if you have the desire and you have the credential and you just want to do it, then 
you just let them know that you're interested.
And in many cases, you may have to volunteer at first but there is a shortage all over 
now.
One of the things that that I think Rebecca mentioned about relocation, there is no 
shortage I don't think of individuals who may want to teach.
But when it comes down to it, many of these positions are in person.
And so getting someone to move to a different part of the country, especially when 
you're not talking about massive increases in pay or maybe a lateral move and so forth like that, 
it's just difficult.
But if you have a program near you and you let them know that you're interested, I'm 
sure that they'd be very happy to at least have that conversation with you.
Another thing that you can do is go to the meeting, CLEC.
I've mentioned that in the presentation every year.
And just go there and talk to people, just meet people.
And that's really a great way just to network as well.
It's, a great group.
Well, that's all of our questions that we have.
I want to say thank you, Nathan and Rebecca, for sharing your knowledge and passion 
to address the laboratory shortage.
Thank you. You're very welcome, we enjoyed it
Thank you.
Back to you, Blanche.
Thank you.
Thank you.