This week, April 19-25, marks Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, and now more than ever we have a reason to celebrate the tireless efforts of our pathology faculty and staff and UAB Hospital labs colleagues. 

As always, we are used to working behind the scenes – but now, our colleagues have stepped up to tackle COVID-19.

Our efforts include laboratory-developed RNA tests for COVID-19 and scaling that testing to more than 500 patients per day, with a turnaround time of less than 24 hours. This includes all inpatient admissions, all patients undergoing surgical procedures at UAB Hospital, and labor and delivery patients.

Click to View Slideshow

A second COVID-19 RNA testing platform with less than two hours’ turnaround time is now operational. Our ability to scale up to high-throughput testing has allowed us to support rural and affiliate hospitals throughout the state; we have faculty working full-time in more than half a dozen smaller hospitals throughout Alabama, meeting a crucial need.

Serological testing, believed to be the next phase in tackling this pandemic, launches in our department this week to help assess patients, employees, students, and healthcare workers for COVID-19 exposure. This endeavor will be critical to reopening clinical, research, and educational services at UAB.

Our administrative teams work tirelessly behind the scenes to adapt to remote work, from enabling educational opportunities for trainees to ordering food for clinical staff to facilitating online meetings. The Laboratory Medicine team also helped organize and promote blood drives at the outset of this pandemic so that our blood supply levels – which were critically low – have leveled off.

We applaud the ability of our colleagues to adapte to this unprecedented situation and thank them for their dedication to their work and the health and safety of our patients.