Blog
Behind the Scenes at MCMC: Laboratory
A look at lab services at MCMC.
We know that it's hard to know what every department at a healthcare facility does. In rural healthcare, there's also misconceptions about what care you can all get within your community.
Heather Hoekman, MCMC's Laboratory Manager, answered a few questions to help all of us understand what the lab department all does here in Murray County.
Can you explain what the laboratory department is and what tasks you handle?
The lab in MCMC is responsible for drawing patients including ER, inpatients, and outpatients as well as clinic patients. We process all blood samples and perform testing in our own lab here; there are some tests we send to our reference lab in Sioux Falls.
How many staff members are there in your department and what do their schedules look like?
In our lab, there is myself (Heather) as manager and 4 full-time technicians. Schedules vary from 6:30-5:30pm in house and then 24/7 staffing. We rotate taking call nights and weekends.
Being a rural healthcare facility, people may assume we can't handle a lot of different testing and that they need to go to a bigger facility. Can you help explain the amount of testing we do onsite and why that's amazing for our community?
We do CBCs, coagulation, chemistries, cardiac enzymes, thyroids, viral panels, and crossmatching blood to name a few. We are able to help our community stay on top of their health with routine checkups and help take care of the most critical patients in a time of emergency.
What is the best and most challenging part of labs job?
The best part of our job is helping patients stay on top of their health whether it's managing cholesterol or diabetes, providing blood for transfusions, or helping their provider reach a new diagnosis that needs attention. The most challenging part is busy ER situations running multiple labs on several patients at a time.
How does your work help support patients at MCMC?
Having a lab in Slayton that does quite a bit of testing helps keep many patients local and at our facility instead of needing to drive far for blood draws or being transferred to a larger facility. We perform lab draws/testing for any provider, even those who don't see you at our facility.
Is there anything you'd want patients and the community to know?
Although we are mostly behind the scenes, we take pride in the testing we perform and are always looking at new tests we can add to our lab to better benefit the community.
