On Saturday, October 22, almost one hundred technologists and other lab staff from across the province descended upon the conference rooms at Toronto General Hospital for the 5th Annual Laboratory Medicine Program (LMP) Conference.
Billed as a conference “for technologist by technologists” the conference is designed to encourage lab staff to learn more about their role with lab medicine and stay up to date about the latest and greatest “going ons” in the world of medicine.
Oh, “technologist” is the term for the trained lab staff that handle and process the samples and tissues that are sent to our lab. There are many other people within the lab that aren’t called “technologists” because it is often tied to specific education and earned credentials, but for the sake of this piece, we’re going to use that term broadly.
The point is that there are a lot of people who look after your sample or tissue and these folks are committed to staying on top of professional development and learning more about how to do their jobs even better.
The conference went all day and began with a keynote address from Michele Henry, Laboratory Medicine Program Director, UHN, and followed by a speech from Dr. Sylvia Asa, Medical Director and Pathologist-in-Chief. Both Michele and Dr. Asa spoke on complementary topics around partnerships, career development and why we need to continue to work more closely with other hospital labs, locally, provincially, nationally and internationally.
After these addresses, the day was broken up into various sessions where the participants could pick-and-chose which presentation appealed the most to them. The various presentations were (with modified titles):
- Insights from Flow Cytomety– Dr. Elisa Laurenti
- Middleware, Cellavision and the Clinical Hematology Laboratory – Fatima Cardoso and Ivana Vidovic
- Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease – Dr. Maria Pasic
- Prostate Cancer Tissue Biomarkers – Dr. Theo Van Der Kwast
- Accreditation – Mary Fountas
- Bacterial Typing – Helen Dedier
- International Pathology – Kuwait –Pamela McCartin and Laurie Mason
- Blood Group Confirmation – Dr. Jacob Pendergrast and Sally Balmer
- Understanding HIV – Dr. Prameet Sheth
Overall, the conference went very well and everyone left with a renewed sense of energy, pride and commitment. Well done to all our speakers and attendees – it was a great day!
The Pathology Report 
Wow, marvelous blog layout! How long have you been blogging for?
you made blogging look easy. The overall look of your site is fantastic,
let alone the content!
Excellent post. I’m facing some of these issues as well..