February 21, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Story by: Linda Jerke

Dana Weber has always been interested in biology, but she first started thinking about a medical laboratory career in the mid 1970s as a student at Great Bend High School when she attended a career fair. That was the first time she met Leonard Bunselmeyer, then a medical technologist at Central Kansas Medical Center. His talk about hospital lab work made a distinct impression on her and helped put her on the path to a career as a medical lab technician.

She became one of Barton Community College’s first MLT graduates and after 25 years in the field, she now trains Barton students for similar careers. She draws from her experiences as a student at Barton and from her time in the field not only to teach but also to inspire her students.

“When I graduated from high school, I was planning to attend the University of Kansas to study medical lab technology,” she said, “but I wanted to spend a year getting my prerequisites at Barton first.” Her plan changed when, as a Barton freshman in 1976, she found out Bunselmeyer was working to build an MLT Program at the college.

She got her general education requirements out of the way that first year and in 1977 she became one of the first students to enroll in Barton‘s new MLT Program. She saw firsthand the work that went into starting the program.

“I’m sure Leonard was working 20-hour days as he was building the program,” she said. “We went on field trips to area labs and the labs were so supportive, helping produce cultures, simulating or reviving them so we could learn what we needed to know.” The labs also received students from Barton to train in clinical internships. Weber did her clinicals in a Hays pathology lab the first summer and at Central Kansas Medical Center in Great Bend for her second summer of clinicals.

When Barton started its MLT Program, Kansas had only a one-year clinical laboratory assistant program in Wichita and a two-year MLT program at another community college in the state, said Bunselmeyer, who is now Barton’s Executive Director of Healthcare and Public Safety Education. Clearly, the state needed more institutions to get involved in training medical lab technicians. Training at the baccalaureate level has been around since the 1920s, but at the associate-degree level, the first programs started in 1969, he said.

Weber graduated with the first class of Barton’s MLT Program and passed her certification exam in 1979. In looking for her first job, she realized some hospitals in central Kansas were not used to having medical lab technicians available to work. They weren’t sure how to set the pay scale or the parameters of the job. Area wages tended to be low for MLTs because hospitals and clinics were unfamiliar with what an MLT could do. (Today, that is not the case, as MLTs are in demand in this area and receive competitive wages and benefits.)

At the time she graduated, Weber was working at Ellinwood District Hospital, then as she puts it, “life intervened.” She got married in January 1980, started a family and spent the next six years at home giving full-time care to her young children.

Eventually, Ellsworth Veterans Memorial Hospital offered her a job as an MLT and she accepted, spending the next three years there getting her first real experience in the profession. The demands of working on call presented a problem for her because she was also helping her husband with the operation of their large-scale ranch in the Dubuque area.

She finally took a position at Central Kansas Medical Center and worked there for 20 years. During that time, the tables were turned as she became a supervisor of students in clinical internships at the hospital. “The lab techs who take on the students know somebody helped them when they were just starting out, so they return the favor,” she said.

Three years ago she quit her job at CKMC and decided to start work on finishing her bachelor’s degree. Then life intervened again. The tornado that ravaged the town of Chapman also wreaked havoc on the Weber ranch, doing about $100,000 worth of damage. She spent the summer helping put the ranch back together.

 

Weber then went to work part time for a local doctor’s office until one day Bunselmeyer called to say Barton’s program had an opening to teach clinical microbiology and wanted to know if she would be interested. With more than a little trepidation, she agreed to become an associate instructor. When she expressed her concerns about teaching, Bunselmeyer told her she’d really been teaching most of her life, she just didn’t know it.

She began teaching microbiology in Barton’s MLT Program last fall. This semester she teaches 16 hours – parasitology and mycology on campus and hematology and coagulation online. “And I found out I love it,” she said.

She looks back on her 25-year career from the vantage point of an MLT instructor who can draw on her experiences in the field for advising her students. She tells her students as they embark on their clinicals, “Don’t get the idea that as interns you are doing your supervisors’ jobs for them. That’s not the case. They’re doing you a favor by spending their time with you when they could probably do the work twice as fast.”

Barton Community College Medical Lab Technician associate instructor Dana Weber assists students as they look at specimens through the microscope during their parasitology class on campus.

_________________________________________

 

“Barton’s program is providing such a service to the people in this county,” Weber said. “The average age of the med techs across the nation is around 50. We will need numbers to restock our profession,” she explained. “It’s difficult to find a lab technician who will relocate to this area. At Barton, we are training people who can take over the labs and meet the needs of our communities.”

Weber found out how much people in the small Kansas communities appreciate the medical lab professionals when she was traveling to and from work, sometimes even late at night responding to an emergency at the lab. People got to know her and would tell her just to call if she ever needed help with her car or anything else as she traveled through their town. They knew she was doing an important job for their community.

In Kansas today, there are only two MLT programs, Barton and Seward County Community College, Bunselmeyer said. There are only two bachelor’s degree programs in the state, one at Wichita State University, the other at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

“Barton went online with its MLT Program in 1999 so we now have students across the state and into neighboring states,” he said. Weber pointed out Barton has online students from Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska. “Our instruction is not only local, it also extends far and wide,” she said.

The job outlook for medical lab technicians is expected to be excellent with 14 percent growth between now and 2018, which is faster than average for all occupations, according to the Occupational Outlook Handbook. The volume of laboratory tests continues to increase with both population growth and the development of new types of tests.

Job opportunities are expected to be excellent because the number of job openings is expected to continue to exceed the number of jobseekers, but job growth will not be the only source of opportunities. Many additional openings will result from the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations, retire, or stop working for some other reason, the handbook states.

Although hospitals are expected to continue to be the major employer of clinical laboratory workers, employment is expected also to grow rapidly in medical and diagnostic laboratories, offices of physicians, and all other ambulatory healthcare services. Median annual wages of medical and clinical laboratory technicians were $35,380 in 2008.

Weber can inform her students of these prospects, but her main focus is training them to be the best they can be in their field. “I really admire my students. Many of them work full time, take care of their children, make time to study, and they’re making the grades,” she said. “They are very goal oriented. Barton’s Workforce Training programs are the perfect match for them. They can get their training and go right into the workforce.”

However, not everyone learns at the same tempo. If Weber sees a student struggling, she wants to turn the situation into a success story. “I could see one of my students was struggling, but I knew if I continued to work with her one-on-one and spend extra time with her, she could get over the tough spot,” Weber said. “I encouraged her to repeat some classes and now I can see her being molded into a great tech.

“These courses are tough,” Weber said. “The grading scale requires 93 to 100 percent for an A. If you get lower that 78 percent, you’re done. These students will be well trained for the future, including new fields such as cytotechnology and others. I see their potential and try to work with that.”

About going out into the workforce, she tells her students, “In every experience you learn valuable lessons. You get close to co-workers and people in the community. You touch many people in this profession, and you don’t know which person you might touch and change their life completely.”

Leonard Bunselmeyer changed her life. “His teaching and his influence have been a big part of my life story,” she said.