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An Interview | Nova Scotia Health’s Joshua MacDonald

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CBBC Career College:

Hey Josh! Thanks for agreeing to speak with us today. Can you start by telling us who you are and what you do at Nova Scotia Health?

Josh MacDonald:

My name is Josh McDonald. I’m the Provincial Client and Support Services Program Manager for Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Nova Scotia Health. My portfolio is rather broad and I deal with a lot of the pre-analytical work standardizing our processes across Nova Scotia for specimen before they are placed on an analyzer. Whether it’s being collected, or transported, or processed. All of that work is considered pre-analytical and falls under my portfolio. I also engage with all of the educational institutions that send students to pathology and laboratory medicine for clinical placement. Making sure that those students have a place to have their clinical practicum, that those practicums don’t impact one another. I try to minimize any overlap as much as we can, because we have limited resources, and ensuring that the students and their preceptors have all of the resources they need in order to give the students the best practicum we can.

CBBC Career College:

Great! And what exactly does an MLA do in their day-to-day role?

Josh MacDonald:

MLA is a Medical Laboratory Assistant and our medical laboratory assistants do a lot of work in pre-analytical areas, especially in collecting and processing laboratory specimens. Whether that specimen is blood or some other type of fluid. It could be a tissue, it could be a bronchial brush, or a catheter tip, any type of laboratory specimen that you might imagine. Each needs to be received, and accessioned and processed and prepared in such a way that the laboratory itself is going to be able to provide the best possible and most diagnostic laboratory result for the patient and for their healthcare team. Medical laboratory assistants effectively ensure that this can take place, and that the specimens can be tested properly.

CBBC Career College:

They’re almost like the gatekeepers, really.

Josh MacDonald:

Absolutely. Yeah. They are also, not the only, but they’re certainly one of the primary positions for laboratory where there is the opportunity for patient engagement, patient contact. Working in our blood collection inpatient teams or our blood collection outpatient clinic.

CBBC Career College:

Can you talk about the demand for Medical Laboratory Assistants is like right now? Is it a lucrative career?

Josh MacDonald:

Well, in Nova Scotia, demand for Medical Laboratory Assistants is absolutely at an all-time high. The scope of the work is expanding. New blood collection clinics are opening. We need Medical Laboratory Assistants in testing laboratories across the province. There’s job postings on the website with part-time and full-time opportunities available. There is no time that I can remember where we needed Medical Laboratory Assistants more than we do right now. And I would say that with the scope of that work expanding, there’s going to be job opportunities in medical laboratory assistant work absolutely for the foreseeable future.

CBBC Career College:

Does this job involve a lot of person-to-person interaction, or is it better suited for introverts?

Josh MacDonald:

Oh, for sure. For interested people who want to get into Medical Laboratory Assistant work and don’t want to have that sort of front facing patient contact, there’s countless opportunities within the laboratory itself. You will be working behind the scenes, accepting and processing laboratory specimens, working to operate and maintain laboratory equipment. You could be performing quality control and quality assurance work. There’s many different aspects to the medical laboratory assistant career that allow for work that’s both with the public and, again, sort of behind the scenes is one of the unseen heroes.

CBBC Career College:

Why do you think this is this one of the more popular programs at CBBC? Are there a lot of perks to these types of jobs?

Josh MacDonald:

I think there’s a lot of reward in doing this work in that every specimen is connected to a patient and every result is helping to those patients recover from whatever condition or whatever malady is affecting them. There’s always a knowledge that each piece of work that you’re doing is impacting a patient, helping one patient at a time, and is there’s a high volume of specimens that comes in. So at the end of the day you know that you’ve helped many more patients than you ever could have worked with were you sort of hands on with the patients themselves. It’s an absolutely stable position to be in.

There’s, again, an ever expanding scope for Medical Laboratory Assistants. There’s no shortage of work. Whatever area of the province you’re interested in, there’s a very good chance that there’s a position there waiting for you. So if you want to work in the South Shore, you want to work in Cape Breton or you want to work in Halifax, the odds are that there’s an opportunity there waiting. And those positions, as I said, are absolutely stable. There’s no end in sight for the need for Medical Laboratory Assistants. It seems it’s only going to be getting greater as time goes on.

CBBC Career College:

Excellent! And why should someone consider a career as a Medical Laboratory Assistant?

Josh MacDonald:

Well, if you have an interest in science and healthcare and laboratory work and want to build skills that are transferrable, get into a career that can grow, get into a position that will always be there and be stable work for you, and connect with your community, be part of the medical team, you should absolutely give Medical Laboratory Assistant a lot of consideration as a career option. It’s not a huge time commitment in order to be trained as a Medical Laboratory Assistant, within a few months you can be career-ready and part of the workforce and beginning your career journey with the laboratory.

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