From setting up, cleaning, and maintaining medical laboratory equipment to analyzing samples and delivering results, medical laboratory professionals are critical to patient health in Canada. These highly skilled professionals draw upon their training, experience, and expertise daily to provide diagnoses for a wide range of conditions and diseases. The results of the tests they administer form the basis of important and often life-saving treatment plans.
In this way, each of us is indebted to laboratory professionals. Their diligence protects us, our loved ones, and our communities.
This was nowhere more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, medical laboratory professionals conducted over 440 million tests annually in Canada. This number skyrocketed during the pandemic, and despite the immense strain, medical laboratory professionals continued to provide diagnoses and deliver results that helped slow the spread of this devastating, highly transmissible disease.
Medical laboratory professionals are essential to the health care system yet, as a 2022 study observed, the “behind-the-scenes” nature of their work means that medical laboratory professionals are forgotten and overlooked, often facing a lack of recognition and gratitude.
This week is an opportunity to celebrate these heroes and remind them that behind-the-scenes does not mean back-of-mind. It is an opportunity to express our immense gratitude for their incredible, life-saving work and to advocate for the conditions they need to do their work safely and with dignity. Medical laboratory professionals were among the first workers outside of the Ontario Public Service to join OPSEU/SEPFO. For more than four decades, OPSEU/SEPFO has proudly represented medical laboratory workers, recognizing that without medical laboratory professionals, our hospitals, research laboratories, clinics, and communities would not function.