Summer of ’69 saw the first moon landing and John Stevens started work in pathology at Southampton. Ultimately, John would become an IBMS president and is currently Chair of the Academy for Healthcare Science.
I had, you could say, underperformed at A-Level and didn’t get the grades required to read Zoology at the University of London. Obviously, I took employment as a labourer in a meat pie factory.
My mother, not over enamoured by my career choice, applied on my behalf to the local laboratory. The interview consisted mainly of the Principal Laboratory Technician ascertaining that I would be willing to play for the hospital football team.
Although having studied Maths, Zoology and Chemistry to A-level at school, I had never heard of pathology and certainly not the individual disciplines of haematology and blood transfusion, biochemistry, histopathology and cytology, and microbiology – virology and immunology not yet having been invented!
I spent my career working in haematology and transfusion (until I took the pieces of silver and moved into management). I had long given up trying to explain to people what I did at work, and for 35 years was known in my local pub as ‘John the Blood’.
There is a general ignorance of science in society, a fact of which many people are proud. When I started at Southampton, we did about 150 haemoglobins and 120 white blood counts a day. This will have increased now to over 3000 full blood counts a day, and this increase will have been mirrored in the other disciplines. Despite this 2000% increase in workload and therefore public interactions with pathology, I suggest the public still has no idea what happens behind the doors of pathology – admittedly at the start of my career this was somewhat self-inflicted as we enjoyed the anonymity.
We all watch hospital-based television programmes and shout at the TV (well I do!) “that wouldn’t happen’, with laboratory staff ‘appearances’ restricted to being invisible on the other end of a phone call request for “six units of O-Neg stat!”.
There have been remarkable efforts recently in raising the profile of pathology, such as National Pathology Week, Harvey’s Gang and laboratory open days. An explosion in the public profile of pathology in social media should have assisted dramatically, and websites like Lab Tests Online UK provide the patient with access to a level of information that was undreamt of at the start of my career.
The mantra of “Up to 70% of all diagnoses depend on pathology; Pathology is vital for patients to get the services they need at the time and in the place they need them; Pathology supports delivery of key targets and commitments, particularly around cancer, coronary heart disease, access, waiting times and A&E” has been adopted throughout, even though no-one is quite sure on what it is based!
If you were employed to raise the profile of laboratory science, you could not have come up with a better campaign than the current deadly coronavirus pandemic. Here was an opportunity for all our scientists to show how important laboratory science is for diagnosis and treatment.
Laboratory scientists leapt into the breach and performed miracles in getting the brand-new PCR assays off the ground and ‘ramping up’ (sic) the number of available tests from nowhere to 100,000 available tests a day.
The IBMS President Allan Wilson has been very articulate in describing the work and potential of laboratory scientists and has probably appeared in the mainstream media more times than all previous presidents of the organisation put together.
The problems started with politicians insisting that all decisions were made ‘following the science’. This reduced all branches of science to just one unified, undefined science. They then redefined the term test to mean sample collection, and misnamed sample collection centres as test centres; then followed this with a second redefinition of test to mean potential sample collection (as in the swabs have been distributed). Not surprisingly, the element of the daily press conference covering tests performed became confused, as tests no longer meant results reported. This was then dropped altogether. To add insult to injury, they neglected publicly to thank the very people responsible for setting up and performing the tests.
However, no matter how much we love our own branch of science, the real problem is the technology is too difficult for most people to comprehend; I wonder how many ‘non-molecular’ laboratory scientists could describe the methodology of COVID-19 rRT-PCR to another scientist, let alone the public.
What a shame that the virus doesn’t behave so that all patients develop antibodies that could be measured using an accurate point-of-care (POC) test, then of course it could be performed by the patients themselves. Self-performed POC testing has raised the knowledge and awareness of patients with chronic diseases or long-term anticoagulant therapy.
Laboratory scientists are not alone in their lack of public comprehension, as all the other 50-odd branches of healthcare science suffer the same or similar fate, despite many having direct contact with patients.
I am not suggesting that we should all stop trying to inform the public and, probably more importantly, the politicians of the importance of well-trained and regulated staff working in accredited establishments, far from it, but I have waited 50 years so you may have to be a little patient! To quote Victor Hugo: "There is a visible labour, and there is an invisible labour".
John Stevens CSci FIBMS
(aka John the Blood)
