TUCKED away behind Tamworth’s redeveloped hospital, it’s like the answer section in a textbook.
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The Tamworth pathology lab works around the clock to find clinical answers to potentially life-changing questions.
Wednesday marked World Pathology Day, so the lab to threw open its doors to show the hardware, software and brain-power helping Tamworth identify and fight life-threatening disease.
It’s not the musty, fetid room filled with agar dishes, beakers and test tubes which might reside in people’s minds, but the old building the path lab calls home does run hot with air conditioners and power hungry computers and machines firing around the clock.
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While automation has made its presence felt in the lab, like many other industries, NSW Health New England operations manager Neil Horton doesn’t believe jobs would be lost to the machines.
“There is a thought that we are deskilling as things become more automated, but it does open other doors,” Mr Horton said.
He believed more responsibilities would eventually filter down to the pathology units.
“If you looked at the big picture, over the horizon, people’s genetic testing and the ability to predict disease or people who are possibly going to get a disease will start to come from research down to the laboratories like this,” he said.
“But there’s no doubt automation is changing the workforce and has done for more than 20 years now.”
For the lab at Tamworth, Mr Horton said there could be tens of thousands of various tests on samples done every day.
In Tamworth’s case, the lab isn’t in the same building as the hospital’s emergency and intensive care units, but there isn’t a disconnection from the fact an answer a pathologist could find might completely change the course of someone’s life.
“Often we will find with people in the haematology department, where we’re looking at bloods, we’re looking down the microscope at blood smears,” Mr Horton said.
“If you happen to get a kid or an adult with Leukaemia, your heart drops.”
Mr Horton worked for many years at the Glen Innes and Inverell hospitals, where he said the proximity to patients could be more pronounced.
“You’re in there sticking needles in people, actively participating in their care,” he said.
“In the bigger hospitals, it tends to be the blood in the tube a bit more.”
He said it could be hard to recruit pathologists regionally, but he thought there was good retention rates with scientists who crossed over into the field.
“They can accumulate a whole body of knowledge,” he said.