Heart Behind the White Coat | Brandy Gunsolus, DCLS,MLS (ASCP) CM
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In this program:
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus shares how her educational journey led her to medical laboratory science in this Heart Behind the White Coat (HBWC) program. Watch as Dr. Gunsolus explains her passion in laboratory science, the need for more laboratory scientists, and how these professionals can help people compared to other medical scientist professionals.
Transcript
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus:
So this is actually a second career for me. I started out getting a degree in chemistry, and it was at a time...I am from Louisiana, and at that time Louisiana economy had tanked in the ‘90s, and I couldn't get a job as a chemist doing anything except teaching high school. I was teaching public high school in New Orleans, and very quickly realized that, yeah, I loved teaching. Teaching high school was not for me. My next door neighbor was actually what we used to call a med tech, now called a medical laboratory scientist, and she exposed me to a program at our local medical school that if you had a bachelor's degree and either biology or chemistry, that you could add on a second bachelor's degree in Medical Laboratory Science in just 15 months.
So what I did was I took the jump, I left teaching, I did the 15-month program, and here I am, medical laboratory scientist, and I absolutely love my career path that I've chosen.
So it's not really one particular person. It is more of a group of people. When I became a medical laboratory scientist, that was in New Orleans, as I just said, and a few years after I had graduated and I was working in a hospital there, Katrina hit, and I was actually had to be relocated to Northern Louisiana. When I got to North Louisiana, I actually ended up taking the position as lab manager of a large position, office lab with an urgent care center, and we had a group of really great physicians there, and as those physicians got to know me, we started asking me more questions on things that I realized that I really didn't know a whole lot about. It was more clinical in treatment and how lab tests actually intermingled with their treatment plans, and that's when I decided to go back and get my master's and eventually my doctorate in Clinical Laboratory Science, and I'm now an advanced practitioner in Clinical Laboratory Science.
The lab is my heart, I love lab testing. It is amazing, and it is for those people that they want to be in medicine, but they still want to sudoku of puzzles to try to figure out where everything is and how it all fits in, and I love lab medicine, it is just...it's my life blood. I love it.
So one thing that people might be surprised to learn is that I was a teen mom, I actually had my oldest at 17, and a lot of people think, “Oh well, that's going to ruin someone...it's the end of life,” but I'm here to show you that if you actually...if you put your mind to it, you can overcome anything, and I am proof of that. Yes, I made mistakes as a teenager, I was young and stupid as we all go through those phases at some point in our life, but I put my mind to it.
I got my degree, I got second degree, got my third and now my fourth degree, and here I am as a doctor of clinical laboratory science, doing what I love, and I have made an amazing career, have been in the lab for 20 years now, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Our national society, American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science, has been broadcasting for well over 15 years now, I think it's 20 years about the shortage, the impending shortage of medical laboratory professionals, they have been forecasting that we were going to hit a critical point where it would no longer be able to keep up with the demand for lab testing. We're there. COVID has tipped us over to the critical point. We do not have enough medical laboratory professionals to perform all of the testing that is out there that needs to be done to ensure that we're having sufficient healthcare and we can continue to maintain access to healthcare for those that are aspiring number one, a biology degree is not going to cut...
That's number one. I have seen so many resumes, I can't tell you the number of resumes with people that apply with a biology degree and that's all they have, and they think they can then go work in a hospital laboratory, and you cannot with just plain biology degree and nothing else, no additional training, no additional anything. Just a fresh, graduate out of college, cannot happen. The best is to attend a Medical Laboratory Science, also known as a clinical laboratory science program, get that degree...you can get an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree. There are programs out there for those, like I did not have a chemistry degree that can transfer over to medical laboratory scientific laboratory science. There are programs help there for those where you don't necessarily have to even get a second degree, but if you do have that biology or chemistry degree, there are programs out there that will help you obtain the necessary skills and experience so that you can become a certified medical laboratory scientists, and that is really the sticking point is that we need more of these individuals, we have been kind of stuck in the basement through basically our entire careers, nobody even knows that we exist until COVID hit, and then the spotlight was finally put on us that, hey, we have all of this testing that needs to be done and we don't have enough people to do the testing, we don't have enough supplies to do the testing, where are all these people going to come from, just throw nurses in there, while nurses...
And I know amazing nurses, I plan nurses, I could not do what nurses do...nurses are trained differently than medical laboratory professionals. They are not the same, and you can't substitute one for another, you wouldn't put a medical laboratory professional at the bedside doing trans session on a patient, you wouldn't put a nurse in a medical laboratory that is trying to keep that chemistry analyzer from grinding itself and making noises and still being able to put out quality laboratory test results that you know are accurate and precise. And so they don't cancel each other out. They're both essential, and while we've addressed the shortage of nurses very well as a country over the last 20, 25 years, we have completely ignored the shortage of medical laboratory professionals, and we have to address it, and we have to address it now, getting out into the communities, talking to high school, even middle school, “Hey, these are professions that are out there,” a lot of high schoolers and middle schoolers that I've talked about, “I've seen CSI and NCIS, I want to do forensics.” There are not a lot of forensic jobs out there, it requires more education, and you get paid half the money, so why don't you work on people who are still alive because we desperately need you.
We really need these individuals, there are so many different areas, it's not just COVID testing, while COVID testing is a big portion, we have everything from our blood bankers that make sure that we're transfusion the right blood to patients and are working up those reactions when it doesn't work right, we have those in HLA that do the same thing. But with organ solid organs, making sure that the transplants that the tissue would be transplanted is correct. We've got chemistry, where they're looking to see how much electrolytes and how much hormones that you have, we've got hematology looking at your blood cells, they're the first ones to actually see, do you have cancer or not? And alert the physician, your Immunology people that are looking at how your body has responded to disease or do you have too much protein and what types of protein you have, cytogeneticists that are doing fish and are doing a lot of those molecular techniques looking and helping to diagnose and treat cancer patients. Cytology looking at the cells of papers, diagnosing cancer histology, where they're actually cutting up the tissue in forming sections, so the pathologists can read, we have all of these different areas.
Oh, let me not forget, microbiology, where they take the bugs that grow on you are in you or out of you, or all different ways and identify those and then identify the drugs to treat those. We are all imperative, and there are not enough of us, we need more people to join the profession and to do it in a way that they could enter the profession quickly.
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