Watkins lab benefits from technology, employee experience

By By Catherine Odson

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

As a child in western Kansas, Patricia Moody used to mix things in the bathroom to see what would happen. She said she was lucky she never came across anything dangerous.

Now, as a medical technologist at Watkins Memorial Health Center, Moody regularly sees dangerous diseases in the center’s laboratory while examining petri dish cultures of lab samples.

“Things that excite us, other people think we’re weird,” Moody said.

The five medical technologists at Watkins have more than 100 years of combined experience, said Susan Iversen, medical technologist and lab supervisor. From June 2004 to July 2005, the Watkins lab served 12,600 individual patients and completed more than 16,000 in-house tests, 2,000 more than the year before. About one-third of all Watkins patients, who total more than 400 some days, visit the lab.

The lab collected blood from 27 potential mumps patients, but the disease is so rare the lab cannot run the tests themselves. After mumps was confirmed on the University’s campus, the state stopped running tests from this area and saved the necessary test materials for other regions, Iversen said.

The lab recently received new equipment to test for tuberculosis, the only such equipment at a student health facility in the state, said Myra Strother, staff physician. The test will help international students meet the TB screening requirement without having to travel off campus for the test.

The technologists run control tests every day to confirm everything is working. This automated equipment allows the technologists to complete a number of tests that would be impossible to accomplish by hand. Some of the tests, such as chlamydia and gonorrhea testing for men, became easier for students as well, requiring urine samples instead of other unpleasant tests, said Patti Green, medical technologist.

Green, who runs the majority of the STI tests, said getting tested is a good thing, not an advertisement of promiscuity.

“What happens at Watkins stays at Watkins,” Iversen said.

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