Rising to the Challenge: Shortages in Laboratory Medicine.

Abstract

At the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, one immediate impact on everyone’s day-to-day lives was the sudden shortage of essential consumable goods, such as soap, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and shelf-stable foods. As regions implemented lockdowns, workplaces reduced staff density to maintain social distancing, countries employed travel restrictions, and the production and shipping of goods decreased. This caused mass shortages in the workforce, which were further compounded by existing staff becoming sick and the older workforce choosing to retire early. Healthcare, where ubiquitous disposable items provide safety and consistency to nearly every task, was not immune to this phenomenon. Healthcare providers suffered shortages of critical items such as gloves, masks, collection kits/containers, pipette tips, reagent packs, and disinfectants at variable time intervals as successive waves of the pandemic rolled across the globe. In our globalized economy, the pandemic cast a spotlight on the highly interdependent networks that had previously provided a steady stream of products calibrated to meet customer demand. Previous aggressive supply-chain optimization had yielded substantial savings. The downside, however, was a brittle supply chain that was unable to accommodate such disruptions. As laboratory staff faced the risks of working in-person to provide essential test results, their value in medicine was acutely appreciated. Nonetheless, the pandemic brought major labor shortages across all sectors. Even before the pandemic, medical technologists were in high demand, which has only intensified in the intervening years.