Recently, Premier Ford released a list of frontline health care workers that deserve to receive a pandemic premium during the Covid-19 pandemic. He left off a VITAL and FRONTLINE profession by excluding the laboratory professionals. Medical Laboratory Technologists/Technicians and phlebotomist are just as exposed if not more than some of the included professions in this list. 

We are required to collect patients from the Nursing Unit (even Covid-19 positive patients), ER patients, outpatients as well as Nursing Home patients. We are inches away (if that) from the patient during specimen collections. Some patients even require multiple collections a day. We are also required to run multiple specimens (throat cultures, streptococcus A tests, urine samples, stool samples,etc) from possible asymptomatic or Covid-19 positive patients. We are in DIRECT (patient collection) and INDIRECT (samples received) contact with Covid-19 positive patients ALL DAY. 

Not to mention, every single day we hear about the number of positive, negative and recovered patients. Medical Laboratory Technologists are the ones performing all these tests. Our test results are being used to make almost every single decision regarding this pandemic. This testing has also increased our workload immensely. We are all working as hard as we can to get these samples sent out, tested and resulted as soon as we possibly can!

Please sign this petition to help us get on this list! #medlabisfrontline