[Histonet] Histotechs: how many are we nationwide?

[Bryan Hewlett]

Bryan,

Here, here!

Bryan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bryan Llewellyn" <llewllew <@t> shaw.ca>
To: "Histonet" <histonet <@t> lists.utsouthwestern.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 5:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Histonet] Histotechs: how many are we nationwide?


> It was said in a post from someone:
>
> "The answer to several of your questions has to do with how a histotech 
> fits in the medical field. The salient fact is that the histotech does not 
> make any diagnostic decisions. That is the province of the pathologist. On 
> the other hand, med techs are "signing out" cases all the time in the 
> "clinical" lab and the pathologist only is involved when there is a 
> discrepancy (sometimes not even then). This happens because med techs are 
> for the most part reporting quantitiative values taken from their 
> instruments. In microbiology they are reporting out postive/negative 
> infections. Cytologists are reporting out diagnoses on interpreted 
> information - far beyond most med tech work - and they have legal 
> liability for it. "
>
>
> I, like most non US histotechs, have stayed out of this discussion about 
> numbers and certification of HT and HTL, but the comment above caught my 
> eye because we had a very similar discussion in Canada on the subject 
> about 25 years ago, as to whether Histotechnologists do work as 
> responsible as Medical laboratory Technologists.
>
> In Canada the debate was started in an attempt by a few who wanted to 
> remove histotechnology from the Medical Laboratory Technologist syllabus. 
> The US is an anomoly in that in most other countries Histotechnology is 
> one of the fundamental disciplines in which Medical Laboratory 
> technologists are trained.  In the US it is replaced with mycology, I 
> believe.  We were successful in stopping the removal of the subject, but 
> one of the major arguments used was that we were not MLTs because we did 
> not sign out reports.
>
> The definition of a MLT is "one who does testing of biological samples", 
> not "a person who signs reports".  I always pointed out that a person who 
> cuts frozen sections of a woman's breast while she is being operated on 
> and who may lose the breast completely as a consequence of that section is 
> doing something just a tad more responsible than signing out a urinalysis 
> report saying, "No pus cells seen."  Reductio ad absurdio in both cases.
>
> As an observation, I understood the original question to be how many 
> people in the US made their living by doing technical work in a histology 
> laboratory rather than how many were formally qualified to do it.  Of 
> course, I have always been in favoour of qualifications, preferably at an 
> advanced level.
>
> Please excuse my intrusion in a US national debate.
>
>
>
>
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