As doctors become more familiar with using biomarkers to monitor Crohn’s disease, clinical laboratories may play a greater role in that process
New evidence-based guidelines from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) that call for using specific biomarkers to help manage Crohn’s disease (CD) may decrease the number of invasive procedures patients must undergo and increase the role clinical laboratories play in monitoring the disease.
The new AGA guidelines “recommend using the C-reactive protein (CRP) biomarker in blood and the fecal calprotectin (FCP) biomarker in stool to measure inflammation levels and assess whether Crohn’s disease is in remission or active,” Medical News Today reported.
Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that causes inflammation in the digestive tract, primarily in the small and large intestine. The cause of the disease is unknown, but genetics may play a role.
Typically, CD patients must undergo repeated colonoscopies to monitor the disease’s progression or remission. This has long been standard practice. Now, however, “AGA recommends the use of biomarkers in addition to colonoscopy and imaging studies,” according to an AGA news release. This hints at a greater role for clinical laboratories in helping physicians manage patients with Crohn’s Disease.
“Patients’ symptoms do not always match endoscopic findings, so biomarkers are a useful tool to understand and monitor the status of inflammation and guide decision making in patients with Crohn’s disease,” said gastroenterologist Siddharth Singh, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego Health and a co-author of the new AGA guidelines.
The AGA’s new guidelines demonstrate how medical science is generating new insights about how multiple biomarkers can be associated for diagnosis/management of a disease in ways that change the standard of care, particularly if it can reduce invasive procedures for the patient by the use of less invasive methods (such as a venous blood draw instead of a colonoscopy).
“Based on this guideline, biomarkers are no longer considered experimental and should be an integral part of inflammatory bowel disease care,” Ashwin Ananthakrishnan MD (above), a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the guidelines, told Medical News Today. Under the new AGA guidelines, clinical laboratories will play a greater role in helping patients monitor their disease. (Photo copyright: Massachusetts General Hospital.)
Patient’s Needs Determine Biomarker vs Endoscopy Monitoring
AGA’s new guidelines could give patients a more comfortable, cost-effective, and possibly more efficient treatment plan to manage their Crohn’s disease. That’s even true if a patient’s Crohn’s disease is in remission.
With these new guidelines, Crohn’s disease patients in remission would only need their biomarkers to be checked every six to 12 months. Patients with active symptoms would need their biomarkers checked roughly every two to four months.
Biomarker testing can be seen as a useful addition to Crohn’s disease care rather than a full replacement of other forms of care. For example, the new AGA guidelines do not fully omit imaging studies and colonoscopies from treatment. Rather, they are recommended in treatment plans based on the patient’s needs.
In their Gastroenterology paper, the AGA authors wrote, “A biomarker-based monitoring strategy involves routine assessment of symptoms and noninvasive biomarkers of inflammation in patients with CD in symptomatic remission to inform ongoing management. In this situation, normalization of biomarkers is an adequate treatment target—asymptomatic patients with normal biomarkers would continue current management without endoscopy, whereas those with elevated biomarkers would undergo endoscopy.”
Fecal Matter Biomarkers
In speaking with Medical News Today on the benefits of using fecal biomarkers to assess a patient’s disease maintenance, gastroenterologist Jesse Stondell, MD, an Associate Clinical Professor at UC Davis Health, said, “If we start a patient on therapy, they’re not responding appropriately, they’re still having a lot of symptoms, we can check that fecal calprotectin test and get a very quick sense of if things are working or not.
“If the calprotectin is normal, it could be reassuring that there may be other reasons for their symptoms, and that the medicine’s working. But if they have symptoms, and a calprotectin is elevated, that’s a signal that we have to worry the medicine is not working. And that we need to change therapy in that patient,” he added.
“This is a win for Crohn’s disease patients,” Ashwin Ananthakrishnan, MD, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the AGA’s new guidelines, told Medical News Today. “Biomarkers are usually easier to obtain, less invasive, more cost-effective than frequent colonoscopies, and can be assessed more frequently for tighter disease control and better long-term outcomes in Crohn’s disease.”
Clinical laboratories should expect these guidelines to increase demand for the processing of blood or fecal matter biomarker testing. As Crohn’s disease monitoring becomes more dependent on biomarker testing, clinical labs will play a critical role in that process.
Insights learned from Canada’s experience may benefit clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups in the US as well
Canada continues to face a severe shortage of skilled healthcare professionals, especially among medical laboratory technologists (MLTs) and radiology technicians (RTs). According to the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science (CSMLS), “In 2010, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) identified that approximately half of all MLTs would be eligible to retire in 10 years, with the greatest impact felt in Canada’s rural and remote communities.” Today, “This staffing concern is currently affecting the professional community across all provinces and territories resulting in the decrease of workers, dramatically impacting organizations and their employees.”
One thing true of government-run healthcare programs is that they consistently underinvest in building new facilities, upgrading older facilities, and training/retaining enough physicians, nurses, and clinical laboratory/radiology workers. This is seen in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, where varies combinations of facility, physician, and other healthcare professional shortages generate regular headlines about patient wait times—particularly for elective procedures—that may be six months to a year or more.
For example, officials at Pasqua Hospital in Regina, which serves patients in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, say diagnostics services may need to be shut down by the end of January as a result of “extended, chronic staffing shortages.”
“We’re barely struggling to keep up with urgent cases,” Christy Labreche, a nuclear medicine technologist told the Regina-Leader Post, which noted that people requesting non-urgent treatment may need to make appointments six to 12 weeks out.
Pasqua Hospital leaders have asked province officials to take “immediate action,” but they feel their concerns are “falling on deaf ears,” the Leader Post reported.
“For over a decade, we have been sounding the alarm on behalf of our members that provide a vital service in the continuum of care,” said nuclear medicine technologist Bashir Jalloh (above) in a CUPE statement. Jalloh is President of CUPE 5430, Saskatchewan’s largest healthcare union which represents medical technologists in a variety of specialties. “Now, as waitlists grow, we are at risk of more disruptions of services and communities on bypass for critical care at a time when wait lists are as long as ever.” Clinical laboratory leaders in the US can gain valuable insights from the struggle with shortages taking place in Canada. (Photo copyright: Regina-Leader Post.)
Chrobak noted the following reasons for the deficit of MLTs in Canada:
An aging workforce: Many current lab scientists are over age 50, signaling a “potential shortage of medical laboratory technologists when seasoned professionals retire.”
Lack of awareness and representation: Other healthcare fields may benefit by being in the public spotlight, while “opportunities and rewards” of a medical lab technology career may not be apparent to job seekers.
Insufficient funding for educational programs: The need for laboratory professionals may supersede “scarce healthcare dollars that fund education programs.”
Barriers to registration: International applicants may be challenged in “recognition of existing field-of-practice competencies.”
Solutions: Improve Recruitment, Retention
To address the MLT shortages across Canada, CAMLPR aims to step up the registration of people interested in the medical laboratory profession through a project in partnership with the Canadian government called the Flexible Pathways to Registration for Medical Laboratory Technologists. The goal is to develop competency standards for entering the profession, ease the registration process, and increase the supply of qualified health professionals in Canada, according to a news release.
This is not the first time Dark Daily has covered Canada’s lab worker shortages.
In “Clinical Laboratories Suffer During the ‘Great Resignation’,” we reported how the so-called “Great Resignation” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on clinical laboratory staffs, creating shortages of pathologists as well as of medical technologists, medical laboratory technicians, and other lab scientists who are vital to clinical laboratories in both Canada and the US.
And in “Lab Staffing Shortages Reaching Dire Levels,” Dark Daily’s sister publication, The Dark Report, noted that CAP Today characterized the current lab staffing shortage as going “from simmer to rolling boil” and that demand for medical technologists and other certified laboratory scientists far exceeds the available supply. Consequently, many labs use overtime and temp workers to handle daily testing, a strategy that has led to staff burnout and a high turnover rate.
Shortages in other areas of Canadian healthcare are on the rise as well, which we covered in “Number of Unfilled Medical Residencies Increases in Alberta and Other Areas of Canada.” We reported that, according to the Angus Reid Institute, approximately half of all Canadians cannot find a doctor or get a timely appointment with their current doctor. And that, just like in many parts of America, certain provinces are experiencing severe medical staffing shortages that includes clinical laboratories and pathology groups.
Global Insights May Offer Ideas
Dark Daily’s coverage of healthcare industry challenges in Canada, the US, and other countries is aimed at helping clinical laboratory managers and pathologists understand challenges faced by government-run healthcare systems, where there is constant pressure on the government to provide adequate funding. Capital is needed to modernize and expand hospitals and clinics. At the same time, there is need to expand training opportunities to solve the shortage of clinical laboratory scientists, medical laboratory and imaging technologists, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals.
The insights gained by studying these healthcare systems may be of value to US-based hospitals and medical laboratories that face their own worker recruitment and retention issues.
One goal of these new functions is to streamline physician workflows. However, these new EHRs may interface differently with clinical laboratory information systems
Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are making great contributions in clinical laboratory, pathology, radiology, and other areas of healthcare. Now, Electronic Health Record (EHR) developers are looking into ways to incorporate a new type of AI—called “Generative AI”—into their EHR products to assist physicians with time-consuming and repetitive administrative tasks and help them focus on patient-centered care.
Generative AI uses complex algorithms and statistical models to learn patterns from collected data. It then generates new content, including text, images, and audio/video information.
According to the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), generative AI “has potential applications across a wide range of fields, including education, government, medicine, and law” and that “a research hospital is piloting a generative AI program to create responses to patient questions and reduce the administrative workload of healthcare providers.”
Reducing the workload on doctors and other medical personnel is a key goal of the EHR developers.
Generative AI uses deep learning neural networks modeled after the human brain comprised of layers of connected nodes that process data. It employs two neural networks: a generator [generative network] which creates new content, and a discriminator [discriminative network] which evaluates the quality of that content.
The collected information is entered into the network where each individual node processes the data and passes it on to the next layer. The last layer in the process produces the final output.
Many EHR companies are working toward adding generative AI into their platforms, including:
As our sister publication The Dark Report points out in its December 26 “Top 10 Biggest Lab Stories for 2023,” almost every product or service presented to a clinical laboratory or pathology group will soon include an AI-powered solution.
“We believe that generative AI has the potential of being a personal assistant for every doctor, and that’s what we’re working on,” Girish Navani (above), co-founder and CEO of eClinicalWorks, told EHRIntelligence. “It could save hours. You capture the essence of the entire conversation without touching a keyboard. It is transformational in how it works and how well it presents the information back to the provider.” Clinical laboratory information systems may also benefit from connecting with generative AI-based EHRs. (Photo copyright: eClinicalWorks.)
Generative AI Can Help with Physician Burnout
One of the beneficial features of generative AI is that it has the ability to “listen” to a doctor’s conversation with a patient while recording it and then produce clinical notes. The physician can then review, edit, and approve those notes to enter into the patient’s EHR record, thus streamlining administrative workflows.
“The clinician or support team essentially has to take all of the data points that they’ve got in their head and turn that into a narrative human response,” Phil Lindemann, Vice President of Data and Analytics at Epic, told EHRIntelligence. “Generative AI can draft a response that the clinician can then review, make changes as necessary, and then send to the patient.”
By streamlining and reducing workloads, EHRs that incorporate generative AI may help reduce physician burnout, which has been increasing since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Language models have a huge potential in impacting almost every workflow,” Girish Navani, co-founder and CEO of eClinicalWorks, told EHRIntelligence. “Whether it’s reading information and summarizing it or creating the right type of contextual response, language models can help reduce cognitive load.”
Generative AI can also translate information into many different languages.
“Health systems spend a lot of time trying to make patient education and different things available in certain languages, but they’ll never have every language possible,” Lindemann said. “This technology can take human language, translate it at any reading level in any language, and have it understandable.”
MEDITECH is working on a generative AI project to simplify clinical documentation with an emphasis on hospital discharge summaries that can be very laborious and time-consuming for clinicians.
“Providers are asked to go in and review previous notes and results and try to bring that all together,” Helen Waters, Executive Vice President and COO of MEDITECH, told EHRIntelligence. “Generative AI can help auto-populate the discharge note by bringing in the discrete information that would be most relevant to substantiate that narrative and enable time savings for those clinicians.”
Many Applications for Generative AI in Healthcare
According to technology consulting and solutions firm XenonStack, generative AI has many potential applications in healthcare including:
The technology is currently in its early stages and does present challenges, such as lack of interpretability, the need for large datasets and more transparency, and ethical concerns, all of which will need to be addressed.
“We see it as a translation tool,” Lindemann told EHRIntelligence. “It’s not a panacea, but there’s going to be really valuable use cases, and the sooner the community can agree on that, the more useful the technology’s going to be.”
Since generative AI can be used to automate manual work processes, clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups should be alert to opportunities to interface their LISs with referring physicians’ EHRs. Such interfaces may enable the use of the generative AI functions to automate manual processes in both the doctors’ offices and the labs.
Zoomers’ unique approach to work and personal health could affect clinical laboratory workplaces, how staff is managed, and how they personally use lab tests
Would it surprise you to learn that Generation Z is poised to make up 75% of the workforce in the United States by 2025? This fact has many implications for clinical laboratories, genetic testing companies, and pathology practices. That’s because Zoomers, as they are called, will be dominant in two ways. First, they will make up the majority of the lab workforce. Second, they will be the majority of consumers and patients accessing medical laboratory testing services.
Zoomers (born 1997-2012) approach work and their own healthcare differently than previous generations. This is partly due to Zoomers being “digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones,” according to Pew Research.
Now, a recently released report by economic research firm Glassdoor on 2024 workplace trends states that Zoomers are about to overtake Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) in the full-time workforce, and that the shift will “represent a pivotal moment of cultural change that US companies cannot ignore.” This includes clinical laboratories and pathology groups that employ them.
According to Glassdoor, Gen Z workers “care deeply about community connections, about having their voices heard in the workplace, about transparent and responsive leadership, and about diversity and inclusion.”
Zoomers bring unique requirements and attitudes to the workplace, but they may also be the fresh infusion of talent a shrinking healthcare workforce needs. It’s no secret that clinical laboratories and pathology groups are facing a labor shortage. An aging workforce combined with burnout from the COVID-19 pandemic have left the entire healthcare industry scrambling for workers.
“A recent survey by Elsevier Health predicts that up to 75% of healthcare workers will leave the profession by 2025. And a 2020 study conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) projected a shortfall of up to 139,000 physicians by 2033,” Medscape reported.
In “Clinical Laboratories Suffer During the Great Resignation,” Dark Daily noted other causes that are behind the abundance of open positions, such as early retirements, graduating individuals experiencing more specialized training programs, and a shift in the way the current working generation views employment.
Thus, the current healthcare workplace should not only expect unique challenges as Zoomers take over, but also changes that come with adapting to a smaller, younger workforce.
“[Gen Z] will pressure employers to establish a company’s purpose in a way that contributes to a better society and prioritize a company’s purpose along with profits,” Mark Beal (above), Assistant Professor of Professional Practice and Communication at Rutgers University, told Forbes. “Having succeeded at remote learning, they will influence an increased transition to hybrid and remote work as well as the four-day work week.” Clinical laboratories that understand Zoomers’ motivations will likely have more success integrating them into their workforce. (Photo copyright: Rutgers University.)
However, there could be unique challenges with a Zoomer workforce as well. According to Forbes, more than half of these new workers are willing to leave their jobs over “dissatisfaction with fulfillment (59%), professional development (57%), and providing value (53%).”
Although this may make some older workers scoff, each generation has entered the workforce with its own unique perspective based on personal values, and the workplace has shifted and changed to reflect the new workers. The same can be said of the clinical laboratory and pathology workforces.
The chart above shows the different generations as a proportion of the total population of the United States as of 2025. It dramatically illustrates why the largest number of working age individuals will be from Generation Z (aka, Zoomers). With their unique interests and traits, Zoomers will want their workplaces to be responsive in ways that are much different than the generations that preceded them. This will be equally true of how Gen Z accesses clinical laboratory testing services. (Graphic copyright: The Wall Street Journal.)
Gen Z Likes Automation
Another aspect to the increasing Zoomer workforce is Gen Z’s comfort with automated technology. Automation has always shifted how clinical laboratories work, and it can have great benefits for clinical pathology as well.
According to Today’s Clinical Lab, automation reduces error rates by more than 70% and reduces the time needed for each staff member per specimen by 10%.
However, the benefit does not come from automation replacing workers, rather that automated processes reduce repetitive work that takes time and attention away from workers. And, as noted, Gen Z workers tend to be extremely tech-savvy given the prevalence of technology in their lives.
Automation could fill gaps when it comes to labor shortages, not by replacing workers, but by helping adjust the workflow and avoiding worker burnout by automating tedious tasks. And Gen Z workers may be uniquely suited to engage with automated testing technologies.
Evolving Healthcare Workplaces
“The coming year will … represent a pivotal moment of cultural change that US companies cannot ignore as Gen Z workers—who care deeply about community connections, about having their voices heard in the workplace, about transparent and responsive leadership, and about diversity and inclusion—make up a rapidly growing share of the workforce,” the Glassdoor report stated, adding that 2024 “will test the robustness of workplace institutions,” The Hill reported.
Clinical laboratory managers and pathologists will be managing a multi-generational workforce, each with its own attributes and requirements. Thus, lab managers will need to reflect these difference in the management decisions they make and how they organize the laboratory workplace.
Doctors report difficulty differentiating COVID-19 from other viral infections, impacting clinical laboratory test orders
Because the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is in the same family of viruses that cause the common cold and influenza, virologists expected this virus—which caused the global COVID-19 pandemic—would evolve and mutate into a milder form of infection. Early evidence from this influenza season seems consistent with these expectations in ways that will influence how clinical laboratories offer tests for different respiratory viruses.
While new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus continue to appear, indications are that early in this flu season individuals infected with the more recent variants are experiencing milder symptoms when compared to the last few years. Doctors report they find it increasingly difficult to distinguish COVID-19 infections from allergies or the common cold because patients’ symptoms are less severe, according to NBC News.
This, of course, makes it challenging for doctors to know the most appropriate clinical laboratory tests to order to help them make accurate diagnoses.
“It isn’t the same typical symptoms that we were seeing before. It’s a lot of congestion, sometimes sneezing, usually a mild sore throat,” Erick Eiting, MD, Vice Chair of Operations for Emergency Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, told NBC News. “Just about everyone who I’ve seen has had really mild symptoms. The only way that we knew that it was COVID was because we happened to be testing them.” Knowing which tests for respiratory viruses that clinical laboratories need to perform may soon be the challenge for doctors. (Photo copyright: Mt. Sinai.)
Milder COVID-19 Symptoms Follow a Pattern
Previous hallmarks of a COVID-19 infection included:
Loss of taste,
loss of smell,
dry cough,
fever,
sore throat,
diarrhea,
body aches,
headaches.
However, physicians now observe milder symptoms of the infection that follow a distinct pattern and which are mostly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract.
Grace McComsey, MD, Vice President of Research and Associate Chief Scientific Officer at University Hospitals Health System (UH) in Cleveland, Ohio, told NBC News that some patients have described their throat pain as “a burning sensation like they never had, even with Strep in the past.”
“Then, as soon as the congestion happens, it seems like the throat gets better,” she added.
In addition to the congestion, some patients are experiencing:
headache,
fever,
chills,
fatigue,
muscle aches,
post-nasal drip.
McComsey noted that fatigue and muscle aches usually only last a couple of days, but that the congestion can sometimes last a few weeks. She also estimated that only around 10-20% of her newest COVID patients are losing their sense of smell or taste, whereas early in the pandemic that number was closer to 60-70% of her patients.
Doctors also noted that fewer patients are requiring hospitalization and that many recover without the use of antivirals or other treatments.
“Especially since July, when this recent mini-surge started, younger people that have upper respiratory symptoms—cough, runny nose, sore throat, fever and chills—99% of the time they go home with supportive care,” said Michael Daignault, MD, an emergency physician at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California.
Milder SARS-CoV-2 Variants Should Still be Taken Seriously
Doctors have varying opinions regarding why the current COVID-19 variants are milder. Some believe the recent variants simply aren’t as good at infecting the lungs as previous variants.
“Overall, the severity of COVID-19 is much lower than it was a year ago and two years ago,” Dan Barouch, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told NBC News. “That’s not because the variants are less robust. It’s because the immune responses are higher.”
McComsey added that she doesn’t think mild cases should be ignored as she is still seeing new cases of long COVID with rapid heart rate and exercise intolerance being among the most common lingering symptoms. Re-infections also add to the risks associated with long COVID.
“What we’re seeing in long COVID clinics is not just the older strains that continue to be symptomatic and not getting better—we’re adding to that number with the new strain as well,” McComsey said. “That’s why I’m not taking this new wave any less seriously.”
Clinical Laboratory COVID-19 Testing May Decrease
According to Andrew Read, PhD, Interim Senior Vice President for Research and Evan Pugh University Professor of Biology and Entomology at Pennsylvania State University, there is nothing unexpected or startling about the coronavirus acquiring new mutations.
“When a mutation confers an interesting new trick that’s got an advantage, it’s going to be popping up in many different places,” Read told the New York Times. “Everything we see is just consistent with how you imagine virus evolution proceeding in a situation where a new virus has jumped into a novel host population.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 Data Tracker—which reports weekly hospitalizations, deaths, emergency department (ED) visits, and COVID-19 test positivity results—shows infection trends fluctuating, but overall, they are decreasing.
For the week of October 21, 2023, there were 16,186 hospitalizations due to COVID-19 compared to the highest week recorded (January 15, 2022) with 150,674 hospitalizations nationwide.
The highest number of deaths reported in a single week were 25,974 for the week of January 8, 2021, while 637 patients perished from COVID-19 during the week of October 21, 2023.
In January of 2021, COVID accounted for 13.8% of all ED visits and in October 2023, COVID-19 was responsible for 1.3% of ED visits.
“What I think we’re seeing is the virus continuing to evolve, and then leading to waves of infection, hopefully mostly mild in severity,” Barouch told The New York Times.
As severity of COVID-19 infections continues to fall, so, presumably, will demand for COVID-19 testing which has been a source of revenue for clinical laboratories for several years.
Millions of cancelled healthcare appointments and lengthy waits for care abound in UK, New Zealand, and in the US
Strikes continue on multiple continents as thousands of healthcare workers walk off the job. Doctors, medical laboratory scientists, nurses, phlebotomists and others around the world have taken to the picket lines complaining about low wages, inadequate staffing, and dangerous working conditions.
In England, junior doctors (the general equivalent of medical interns in the US) continue their uphill battle to have their complaints heard by the UK government. As a result, at hospitals and clinics throughout the United Kingdom, more than one million appointments have been cancelled due to strikes, according to the BBC.
“The true scale of the disruption is likely to be higher—many hospitals reduce bookings on strike days to minimize last-minute cancellations,” the BBC reported. “A total of one million hospital appointments have had to be rescheduled along with more than 60,000 community and mental health appointments since December [2022], when industrial action started in the National Health Service (NHS).”
According to The Standard, “Consultants in England are to be re-balloted over the prospect of further strike action as doctors and the government remain in talks with a view to end the dispute. The British Medical Association (BMA) said that specialist, associate specialist, and specialty (SAS) doctors will also be balloted over potential strike action.”
“We must be prepared to take the next step and ballot for industrial action if we absolutely have to—and we will do this … if upcoming negotiations fail to achieve anything for our profession,” Ujjwala Anand Mohite, DRCPath, FEBPath (above), a histopathologist at the NHS, Dudley Group of Hospitals, and the first female Chair of the SAS committee UK, told The Guardian.
New Zealand Doctors, Clinical Laboratory Workers Strike
In September, the first-ever nationwide senior doctor strike occurred in New Zealand and was then followed by another strike of about 5,000 doctors and 100 dentists from New Zealand’s public hospitals, the World Socialist Web Site reported.
Similar to the UK, the strikes reflect mounting frustration over pay not keeping up with inflation and “decades of deteriorating conditions in the public health system,” the WSWS noted.
This follows months of strikes by the island nation’s medical laboratory workers, which are ongoing.
“Our pay scales, if you compare them internationally, are not competitive. About half of our specialists come from abroad, so it’s quite important for the country’s health system to be able to attract and keep people,” Andy Davies, a lung specialist who joined the picket outside 484-bed Wellington Hospital, told the WSWS.
“We’re not asking for the world, we’re asking for an inflationary pay rise, and we haven’t had an inflationary pay rise year-on-year, and it’s beginning to show,” he added.
“What type of health system do they want?” he continued. “Do we want one that treats all people and manages what they need, or do we want a hacked down system that does less?”
The conflicts over pay and working conditions have caused many healthcare workers in New Zealand to leave the field entirely. This has led to severe shortages of qualified workers.
“Patient waiting times—for cancer, hip replacements, cardiac problems, and many other conditions—have exploded due to understaffed and overwhelmed hospitals,” the WSWS reported.
US Healthcare Workers also Striking
The US has its share of striking healthcare workers as well. Healthcare Dive tracked 23 ongoing or anticipated strikes throughout the nation’s healthcare industry since January 1, 2023. In 2022, there were 15 strikes of healthcare workers at the nation’s hospitals and health systems.
These walkouts include doctors, nurses, pharmacy workers, imaging specialists, and thousands of frontline healthcare workers striking over dangerously low staffing levels, unsafe working conditions, and low pay.
In October, 75,000 nurses, support staff, and medical technicians from Kaiser Permanente participated in a 72-hour strike comprised of hundreds of hospitals and clinics throughout California, Washington state, Oregon, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, Reuters reported.
The three-day strike, “Marked the largest work stoppage to date in the healthcare sector,” Reuters noted. Doctors, managers, and contingency workers were employed to keep hospitals and emergency departments functioning.
“The dispute is focused on workers’ demands for better pay and measures to ease chronic staff shortages and high turnover that union officials say has undermined patient care at Kaiser,” Reuters stated.
Staffing shortages following the COVID-19 pandemic are partly to blame for current struggles, but contract staffing to fill critical positions has exacerbated the problem.
“Kaiser’s outsourcing of healthcare duties to third-party vendors and subcontractors has also emerged as a major sticking point in talks that have dragged on for six months. … The clash has put Kaiser Permanente at the forefront of growing labor unrest in the healthcare industry—and across the US economy—driven by the erosion of workers’ earning power from inflation and pandemic-related disruptions in the workforce,” Reuters noted.
Across the globe, many healthcare workers—including clinical laboratory scientists in countries like New Zealand—are feeling burnt out from working in understaffed departments for inadequate pay. Hopefully, in response to these strikes, governments and healthcare leaders can come to resolutions that bring critical medical specialists back to work.
