Celebrating the RMH Laboratory Team

Ross Memorial Hospital would like to spotlight our laboratory team during National Medical Laboratory Professional Week. The RMH lab is what’s called a ‘core services’ lab, providing chemistry, hematology and blood bank services. The team works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to provide testing for patients in our Emergency Department, inpatients, pre-op patients and to patients visiting our outpatient clinics. “Almost all patients who visit the hospital require some form of laboratory testing, whether it’s bloodwork, urine analysis, or other cultures/swabs,” says Pamela Calverly, Director of Laboratory and Diagnostic Imaging.

With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting our community, the lab team has been busier than ever before. “There is a common saying in the lab sector, ‘without lab testing, medicine would be guesswork,” says Pamela . With broad testing being one of the keys to containing COVID-19, that saying has never been more true.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the laboratory team has processed nearly 2000 swabs and is responsible for:

• Sourcing swabs to support the testing for inpatients, emergency patients, assessment centre and now long term care/retirement homes/group homes in the community
• Packaging all swabs and ordering instructions to create COVID-19 swab kits
• Maintaining daily inventory of swabs
• Processing all swabs and sending out for testing
• Receiving and entering all results into our systems and notifying IPAC of positive results. 

Thank you for your incredible work!