How’s that for teamwork ?

Or, why my life is too full for blogging these days.

The new law of the land dictates that all medical biology labs should fuse into these huge, centralized structures, and that these superlabs must obtain ISO accreditation by 2016.

Errrr, uhhhh.

But, the government is still undecided as to whether it will allow ‘reference laboratories’ to exist. These would be specialized laboratories doing very specific and onerous tasks requiring particular expertise, such as genetic analysis.

Ah.

Accreditation is still required, but the domain of expertise is much more limited.

Well, we can handle that.

But the gov still wants us to regroup as much as possible, so my cancer genetics department will still have to fuse with the general genetics lab across the way, and also with the path department that’s started doing somatic genetic analysis.

Errr, well, just tell us what the perimeter is, and who to work with, and what the general structure is going to be.

That last part is still a black box, but highly placed people are apparently considering the subject.

Oh, and don’t let things slide until 2016. A dossier with a part of our activity ready to accredit on the spot as well as a detailed plan for the rest is due by next October.

Oof !

 

This isn’t news just today. We’ve been pondering for a while now.

In the meantime, the path guys have been doing their somatic mutation work on my guys’ machines, sharing lab space and all, and we get along pretty well. We’ve set up a common Quality Group to develop the necessary documentation of our methods and etc. At the detail level, the merge is already beginning.

But at the department head level and above, no news.

So it was with some surprise that we learned that our path head was part of some committee put together at the national level to assess how different hospitals were dealing with the whole thing. We weren’t invited to know what that group was all about. We weren’t sure what was expected of us when a trio of auditors showed up to look us all over for a day. But, great ! we’re happy to address the subject and maybe get somewhere.
Everybody says that it’s clear that Genetics and Pathology are going to merge into a Bio-pathology superdepartment. It’s clear we will have lots of overlap in our daily work. But the organizer of the day fully expected the genetics people to get up and leave after the introduction to the meeting when it was time for the path presentation. ?? here I am at the table, and I'm still not invited to see what's going on?? I hope I was polite enough in begging to stay (at any rate, I did, and so did my colleagues, and I can tell you we learned some things). And none of the path people came back after the lunch break for the genetics presentation.

Um. If we're a single team, why the walls of silence between the diverse parts? Some ideas of who should know what need to change here. At least that’s my opinion.