ASCP has been working to bolster the medical laboratory workforce in both the United States and other countries around the world. This article will look at the role collaboration and partnerships with government, laboratory sectors, health systems, industry leaders, and non-governmental organizations have played in the success of these initiatives in the U. S. and in Mozambique.
For more than a decade, ASCP has worked closely with the Mozambique Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-Mozambique to support the country’s laboratory training needs through funding provided by the CDC PEPFAR Initiative. Guided by the Mozambican Ministry of Health’s identified priorities and their understanding of the educational needs of Mozambique’s medical laboratory professionals, ASCP has provided continued technical and operational support to achieve their vision. This has evolved over the years, from focusing on quality-based laboratory technical HIV-1 viral load laboratory mentorship, remote telementorship programs for molecular biology laboratories, and now, as a consultant in launching the country’s first virtual training (i.e. eLearning) designed for laboratory professionals.
Over the last two years, ASCP was invited to support the Ministry of Health in their country-led initiative to reduce the cost of in-person training by 15 percent by 2025. There were several reasons for pursuing this goal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person training was either eliminated or dramatically reduced at laboratories throughout the country, leading to unavoidable training disruptions. Additionally, the cost to send laboratory professionals from remote provinces to urban training centers was extremely costly. Finally, the Mozambique MOH discovered a gap existed between when laboratory professionals would receive initial training and when they received subsequent continuing education. To bridge this gap, the MOH sought to provide laboratory professionals with virtual training as a form of continuing education.
Through a needs assessment conducted by ASCP in collaboration with CDC-Mozambique and the Mozambican MOH, the ASCP team worked with key laboratory stakeholders to identify the most urgently needed areas of virtual laboratory training. Biosafety was determined to be the most critical area. Mozambican laboratory professionals expressed a desire that virtual training sessions be practical and short, as laboratory workers have limited time in their work schedules for additional training. In mid-April, ASCP global health staff and consultants traveled to Mozambique to collaborate with the MOH’s biosafety subject matter experts and create the country’s first virtual training module for clinical and public health laboratories.
“Biosafety in the laboratory covers the techniques and procedures, from the moment you enter the laboratory to the moment you leave, in order to keep laboratory professionals, patients, the environment, and the community safe,” says Debby Basu, PhD, manager of the ASCP Center for Global Health. “We worked together with our partners to collaboratively create the raw content for this inaugural virtual laboratory module, including seven subtopics for biosafety. What stood out in this entire effort was the collaboration among all the partners—the Ministry of Health, local laboratories, the CDC Mozambique, and others. This sense of a unified goal around developing these training materials propelled our work forward with purpose and enthusiasm.”
Domestic Collaborative Partnerships Advance Workforce Challenges
Meanwhile, Dr. Basu noted that the spirit of collaboration and partnership she observed in the Mozambique initiative is just as vital in the United States laboratory community. ASCP, as a recipient of a cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s One Lab Initiative, has created a virtual laboratory capacity building series, called Building Bridges Across the Laboratory Community, highlighting case studies where collaboration and partnership helped resolve laboratory workforce and public health and emergency responses.
In the first session of the multi-session series, in April, ASCP hosted a webinar about how the New York Laboratory Leadership Consortium came together to effect policy changes in New York City regarding both COVID-19 laboratory needs and practices, as well as licensure change in New York State for laboratory professionals. A second session held in early June highlighted how the physics department at Texas State University helped the city of Austin address supply chain shortages during the pandemic by three-dimensional printing nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing needs. The city had reached out to local academic laboratories and other partners for assistance with the supply chain disruptions, and Texas State and others responded to this call to action.
As these examples demonstrate, the laboratory workforce continues to face unprecedented challenges related to COVID-19; however, the pandemic also highlighted the many ways in which laboratories and partners can collaborate and work together to identify innovative solutions that improve patient care.
To learn more about ASCP’s domestic laboratory workforce capacity work, in support of the CDC OneLab Initiative, including upcoming and recorded sessions of the Building Bridges Across the Laboratory Community series, visit:
ascp.org/SupportCDCOneLab.
This publication was supported by two Cooperative Agreements funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NU47OE000107 and NU2GGH002200 (through the Association of Public Health Laboratories, APHL). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the ASCP and do not necessarily represent the official views of the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the APHL.
