A requirement of the med lab program at BCIT is a clinical practicum placement in levels 4 and 5, after the theory component is done. This is what I will be doing in a few months’ time! The practicum takes place in clinical labs, and there are 2 types of clinical sites to choose from: hospitals and private labs. In BC, there are only 2 of the latter (Life Labs and BC Biomedical), and earlier this year those two companies agreed to merge, so I’m not quite sure if/how that would affect future practicum students.
Something to consider when choosing your clinical sites is the kind of work you’d like to do. While the work done at both sites is largely the same, the types of patients differ. In hospitals, the patients are obviously sicker, whereas private labs get relatively healthy outpatients. Private labs also do not have all the departments that make up medical laboratory technology, because some don’t fit with the needs of the community, such as histology and transfusion science. These departments only exist in the hospital labs. For the purposes of the practicum, if you end up going to a private lab, you will have to go to a hospital (assigned to you) for these 2 rotations since obviously every student has to complete the same amount of training.
Another thing to consider is the size of the clinical site. Larger hospitals e.g. Vancouver General Hospital can take in more practicum students, so there are more chances of securing a spot. But smaller sites might be a better choice if you want more one-on-one attention from your training supervisors without the distraction from other students.
The selection process of the your desired clinical site takes place within the first month of level 1, so that would be January of last year for my class. Basically we were given a form with the possible clinical sites we can choose from, and we had to give our top 3 choices along with a short explanation for why we would like to work at those sites. In the med lab program, unlike in some other health sciences programs at BCIT, we don’t get to rotate between different practicum sites, so we had to choose carefully because we will be stuck with our choice for a whole year.
I didn’t have a strong preference between hospitals versus private labs; back then I didn’t know much about what the practicum component would be like. I just knew that was I wanted to stay in the lower mainland! I ended up picking St. Paul’s, BC Children’s, and LifeLabs as my 3 choices and left it up to fate (and the clinical coordinator) to assign me to a spot. I ended up getting St. Paul’s, which was my first choice. The commute is easy for me, and it’s a large hospital with a diverse patient population, which means a large variety of specimen results from which I can learn. I’m glad I was able to get my first choice; it helps to submit your choices early because the submission date gets taken into consideration along with your rationale for choosing the clinical sites.