Medical Laboratory Assistant - General Pathology

Job overview

Employer: Torbay and South Devon Healthcare

Department: Central Pathology Reception (General Pathology)

Location: Laboratory Medicine, Level 3, Torbay Hospital

18.75 Hours per week (Core hours are 13:30 - 5.30pm Monday – Friday (with expectation to work on some days until 6pm on a rotational basis)

Some Saturday and Bank Holiday work will be required

Torbay and South Devon Healthcare is a Foundation Trust which provides healthcare services for a population of over 300,000. The Laboratory Medicine Directorate provides a comprehensive Pathology service for the Acute Trust, associated NHS organizations and GPs.

The Central Pathology Reception provides a vital role for the Laboratory Medicine directorate in the pre-analytical processing and data entry of over 3000 blood samples a day for the Biochemistry and Haematology Laboratories and approximately 600 samples for Microbiology. The laboratory uses the Laboratory Information System Epic Beaker . Electronic requesting is carried out via Clinisys ICE but some manual data entry is still carried out.

A position is now available in this busy Department.

You will need to work well as part as a team and have excellent communication skills and telephone manner.

Main duties of the job

• To be responsible for the receipt, initial preparation of pathology samples and data processing of test request forms and Order-Comms samples.
• Prepare blood, urine, faeces and fluid samples for analysis.
• Make and receive routine telephone calls to/from GP’s, Medical, Nursing and other Healthcare Professional Staff.
• Deal with visitors to the Reception hatch.
• Provide routine, discipline specific, assistance to laboratory staff

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Deal with telephone enquiries from medical, nursing, and other healthcare professionals Calls include requests for test results, queries regarding blood sample tube type for a large number of different tests, requests for emergency tests. Any more complex queries are referred to senior members of staff
• Contribute to a team of medical laboratory assistants and biomedical scientists in provision of an analytical service to Primary and Secondary Care
• Assist with face to face queries from medical, nursing, other healthcare personnel and the public Removal of blood, urine and faeces samples and request forms from their plastic bags and checking the corresponding data. The samples and request forms are then bar-coded prior to data entry. These samples come from the District General Hospital, General Practice, Community Hospitals and Clinics served by the Trust
• Perform data entry via Electronic Order-Comms and typed data entry from request forms

Full Vacancy details can be found on the attached Job Description/Person Specification. Please refer to your suitability to the post in your supporting information from the role requirements or person specification.