Emmanuel Adusei Poku, MD

In Ghana, your BECE result plays a big role in what you become.

Gadayi came to Accra by bus when we needed him to be part of the team so bad. I Kumasi to Accra not less than 1 hour by flight? He got down from the car to use a motor. ahhhhh Some stories write themselves.

Without Lab results, you're no different from a road side mechanic doing trials and errors based off "signs and symptoms"

Honestly, I would have preferred a different way of handling this. A strike over laboratory access feels like an overreach, especially in a national referral hospital where any disruption immediately affects patients. But the strike is not the real story. The real story is how we got here. Is this a leadership battle, or a territorial battle? If you believe the laboratory should be reserved only for medical laboratory scientists, that is not consistent with how modern diagnostic systems work. If you also believe the laboratory must be led only by laboratory physicians, that is equally incomplete. Those are the two extremes. A serious health system should be able to find a workable middle ground between them. —- The reason this conflict feels so intense is that the laboratory is the center of modern diagnosis. It determines cancer diagnoses, antimicrobial choices, transfusion safety, and clinical decision-making. That is why leading teaching hospitals treat laboratories as diagnostic systems rather than professional territories. ——- Medical laboratory scientists protect the technical reliability of results. They manage testing systems, sample processing, quality control, method validation, instrumentation, accreditation, and workflow. Their core question is: Is this result accurate and reliable? If a test is technically unreliable at Korle Bu, the mere presence of laboratory physicians will not automatically correct that failure. That is why this debate should not be reduced to a vague claim about “validating results.” —- I have also noticed that a few people don't seem to understand what laboratory medicine is about. Laboratory medicine is a well-established specialty. (The history of infectious diseases is one of my favorite topics) Laboratory physicians bring a different function. They connect laboratory findings to diagnosis, specialist reporting, treatment decisions, and complex patient care. Ghana’s own specialist training pathway recognizes laboratory medicine in anatomic pathology, chemical pathology, hematology, and medical microbiology. Their core question is: What does this result mean for the patient? ——- The term “validation” must be separated into at least two levels. Medical laboratory scientists confirm that the sample is acceptable, the instrument worked, quality control passed, and the result is analytically sound. In other words, “Technical Validation.” Laboratory medicine physicians provide clinical validation for a select # of specialist cases. It is worth noting that not every result needs a laboratory physician's sign-out/validation. Most are released through technical validation and approved procedures/protocols. But some tests are different. For example; A biopsy can diagnose cancer. A bone marrow report can diagnose leukemia. Genomic results can shape major clinical decisions. These sometimes require clinical correlation. In most established systems, this is mostly done by laboratory physicians —- If this dispute is mainly about who leads the laboratory, then a better model would be structured co-leadership. A laboratory physician can lead the clinical domain. A medical laboratory scientist should lead the technical and operational/administrative domain. This is what is done in major hospital labs. Then again, I hope this is not merely about “who heads the lab.” And I will be more disappointed if it's also about “ACCESS” —— Healthcare should be organized for patient outcomes and higher standards of care. We can achieve that only through collaboration. Not competing for professional dominance. —- In Johns Hopkins & other major hospitals, laboratory services sit within departments of pathology and laboratory medicine. They have a medical director (usually a laboratory physician/pathologist) and an administrative director (usually a medical laboratory scientist) ——- But what do you think the real issue is? I would love to hear from both sides

2019 herrr no construction question in the Maths paper smh 😭

In Ghana, your BECE result plays a big role in what you become.

Gadayi came to Accra by bus when we needed him to be part of the team so bad. I Kumasi to Accra not less than 1 hour by flight? He got down from the car to use a motor. ahhhhh Some stories write themselves.