Earlier this week, my class went on a field trip to Canadian Blood Services (CBS) which is located on Oak Street, next door to BC Children’s and Women’s Hospitals. While the majority of med lab technologists are employed in hospital or private clinical labs, there are other places where MLTs can work, CBS being one of them.
CBS is the sole provider of blood products in Canada, and we learned a little bit of their history in our Transfusion Science class. Blood transfusions used to be handled by the Canadian Red Cross but CBS was formed in 1998 following many years of “tainted blood” scandal whereby thousands of individuals contracted Hepatitis C and HIV from contaminated blood products.
The purpose of this tour was to familiarize ourselves with how the organization functions, from receiving blood donation to how they produce the blood products to transfuse to patients. Basically, when you go in to donate your blood, they will ask you a series of questions related to your health and travel history. When you’ve passed the screening, you can donate, and a typical donation takes about 15 minutes. Your blood will then be processed. It can remain as whole blood or be separated into components such as red blood cells, plasma, and platelets. These are processed by med lab assistants at CBS and stored at the proper temperatures, and shipped to hospitals as they are needed.
A small sample of each donor’s blood is also sent to the Calgary location of CBS, where they have the main lab that does more sophisticated tests. These samples are tested for diseases like hepatitis B, syphilis, and many others. If the blood is safe (negative for all those tests), then the blood products in Vancouver can be shipped out to the hospitals. The Vancouver location serves the entire provinces of BC and Yukon, so that’s a lot of ground to cover when sending out blood products. One of the interesting things I learned from this field trip: if there are special/rare blood types needed here in BC, they can ask for donation from other provinces but no further than Ontario because the blood products wouldn’t be shipped here fast enough to maintain their proper temperatures and integrity.
Of course the trip wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the laboratory section of CBS! Unfortunately the lab in their Vancouver location is not too big, and they do not hire that many MLTs, so most of us will still end up working in hospitals. The work they do in this lab includes prenatal testing of fetuses’ blood type compatibility with their mothers’, as well as testing on samples referred in from hospitals around BC and Yukon. The latter is usually more specialized tests that the hospitals can’t do on their own either from lack of expertise or resources such as special instruments.
I think this trip was a nice way to learn more about CBS and clinical labs outside of the hospitals, so I’m glad we got to on this field trip. I have another field trip this week so stay tuned for that post!