Cornwall residents will not have to travel to Ottawa to have tissue samples taken in the lab. Instead just a tiny part of them will make the trip – their tissue samples. The patients can stay where they are, as will the Cornwall-based pathologists whose job it is to analyse the results.
The net effect will be four jobs lost in the Cornwall Community Hospital lab run by the Eastern Ontario Regional Lab Association (EORLA). These are the professional staff that would normally prepare the samples for the pathologists to analyse.
The impact on turnaround will depend on who you talk to.
The hospital argues that this represents an improvement, suggesting the lights are just that much brighter in the big city lab and this will somehow lead to a quality nirvana and rapid turnaround.
The reality is the samples will have to be transported to Ottawa where the specimen slides can be prepared, and then sent back to Cornwall for analysis. That’s a round trip of 212 kilometres.
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