On Feb. 16, ASCP and the ASCP BOC submitted a
statement to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, urging it to take action to alleviate a critical shortage of laboratory personnel. The statement was submitted in response to the Committee’s recent hearing on
Examining Health Care Workforce Shortages: Where Do We Go From Here?
The hearing is the Senate’s opening foray into examining and, hopefully, addressing the crisis in healthcare staffing currently affecting the United States.
In our statement, ASCP wrote that “the medical laboratory is in crisis, and its workforce has drastically diminished over the past several years, negatively affecting laboratories’ abilities to deliver timely test results, which in turn affects the quality patient care.” We addressed the critical role that laboratory professionals play in patient care and the impact COVID has had on the laboratory workforce.
ASCP emphasized the need for policy changes to alleviate workforce shortages, including:
• providing laboratory professionals with access to the federal scholarship/fellowship funds and loan repayment programs that currently serve other healthcare professions
• providing funding to increase the availability and capacity of accredited laboratory training programs
• raising the visibility of careers like laboratory medicine via federal outreach efforts and funding for public service announcements
• increasing funding for the Faculty Loan Repayment Program
These recommendations are intended to implement the recommendations outlined in a collaborative report,
Blueprint for Action, developed by ASCP and the University of Washington Center for Health Workforce Studies.
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