Welcome to the Medical Microbiology Lab—where dedicated staff work around the clock to keep infectious diseases in check.
The Microbiology Lab at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) is always on call. Even at 2am, you’ll find a lab technologist ready to process any emergency samples that come in.
“We really do it all,” explains Dr. Diane Roscoe, the Regional Medical Discipline Lead at Vancouver Coastal Health Microbiology. “We are a full-service lab detecting bacterial, fungal parasitic and viral causes of infections, and infections with infection control implications. It’s a huge amount of work and we are open 24/7 for urgent requests that need to be processed overnight.”
As one of the largest labs at Vancouver Coastal Health, the staff here process samples from patients with potential infections from the Sunshine Coast, the Sea-to-Sky Corridor, North Vancouver, Richmond and Vancouver. A staff of about 48-50 people receives and tests the large influx of samples that arrive each day. It’s an enormous volume of work, but the effort helps to diagnose and prevent infectious diseases from spreading in the region.
This past winter, the Microbiology Lab stepped up to help the entire hospital as VGH grappled with a particularly bad flu season. “The flu this year put a strain the region’s resources,” confirms Roscoe. “But we were able to collaborate with other departments in the hospital to help make quick diagnoses to facilitate discharges and bed flow issues—our staff were able to rise to the occasion and coordinate a rapid response to support individual patient well-being and the system’s need to manage bed access.” It’s an effort that is largely out of view.
You don’t see the lab technologists and assistants when you access health services because they’re behind the scenes. But they are an essential part of many diagnoses.
Faster answers through funded innovation
The image of a researcher studying colourful slides under a microscope is often what comes to mind when we think of Microbiology—but that is rapidly changing at the VGH lab.
“For many, many years that was the primary technology in the field,” explains Roscoe. “Researchers from the earliest years of the last century would be comfortable using it! But we are now on the verge of a rapid paradigm shift as we incorporate new technology.”
Through the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation, the lab recently acquired state-of-the-art equipment to sort and process specimens in bulk, providing more rapid diagnoses. The increased efficiency helps the lab to handle the high volume of samples from Vancouver’s growing population.
“These new systems help us cut down the testing time for many samples from a few days to a matter of hours,” explains Roscoe. “We closely rely on studies that we do with the support and assistance of the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute to implement new technology to continuously improve diagnostic accuracy and laboratory efficiency.”
The new technologies mean lab results are returned to patients much more quickly, speeding up treatment and improving care—the ultimate goal of the Microbiology Lab staff. “It’s an example of full circle giving—the community gave to the foundation which helped us purchase this machine, which now helps us diagnose and process samples more quickly—giving back to the community,” says Roscoe.
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