ASCP and 22 other major national laboratory, pathology, and healthcare organizations have joined forces to urge Congress to tackle the critical personnel shortages affecting the pathology and laboratory workforce. The new Medical and Public Health Laboratory Workforce Coalition wrote an
April 25 letter to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee and House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee leaders asking Congress to ramp up efforts to address laboratory personnel shortages.
The coalition’s letter was submitted following a recent Senate HELP Committee’s hearing on healthcare workforce shortages. “Currently, most medical and public health laboratories suffer from significant personnel shortages, and many are operating at or near crisis-mode,” the coalition noted. The letter also addressed the importance of laboratory professionals to the upcoming reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, which is a key piece of the nation’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure. Much of the data on which pandemic response is based comes from work performed by laboratory professionals.
The coalition noted the federal Health Resource and Services Administration (HRSA), which runs most of the federal government’s healthcare workforce development program, administers a number of programs designed to support the healthcare workforce.
However, few of these programs—including grants for training programs, scholarship/ fellowship programs, and loan repayment programs—are available to laboratory professionals. Providing laboratory professionals and laboratory training programs with access to these programs as well as improving visa and immigrations options for laboratory professionals is essential to responding to laboratory workforce shortages.
To read more articles from this issue of ePolicy, click
here. To learn more about ePolicy News and access past newsletters and articles, click
here.
