FROM LAB TECH TO ER DOCTOR
St. Clair grad drawn to medicine
Going into the emergency department to draw blood from trauma patients, as part of her training to become a medical lab technologist, gave St. Clair College student Snezana Ninkovich a ground-level view of doctors and nurses helping people.
“And I thought, wow, this is really cool, I want to do this,” recalled Dr. Ninkovich, who 16 years later is medical director of Windsor Regional Hospital’s Met campus emergency department.
What she learned at St. Clair — especially the hands-on exposure during her nine-month training at the hospital — prepared her to handle the challenges of being a physician.
“I got to see what it was like to be in the ER, what it’s like to be on the floors,” said Ninkovich, who recently was named one of this year’s alumni of distinction at the college. “As a student I got to meet patients and actually (draw blood, known as phlebotomy), and then go back to the lab and process all their tests.
“It really made me feel like I wanted to do more in this area.”
Though it might seem a unique path to start at community college and end up a physician, it’s not uncommon. Several of the city’s most prominent doctors started their post-secondary education at St. Clair in the Medical Laboratory Science program, a challenging three-year advanced diploma program with a virtual guarantee of a job. Other graduates include Windsor Regional chief of oncology Dr. Ken Schneider and local internal medicine specialist Dr. Simon Shanfield.
“There’s always this false assumption that university is harder than college, but I found the Med Lab program very challenging, because you can’t make mistakes in the lab,” said Ninkovich. Errors, she said, can harm a patient.
“You had to study, you had to develop your skills and know what you’re doing. The bar was at a high level.”
Students who’ve earned university degrees before entering the college say it is the toughest program they’ve ever been in, said the program’s co-ordinator Jan Maxwell, a Med Lab technologist for 40 years. The job involves using very sophisticated instrumentation to perform an array of medical tests, for glucose levels, cholesterol, triglycerides, anemia, leukemia and the presence of cancer.
She said results from these tests — of blood, urine, feces, sputum and other samples — help provide up to 80 per cent of all diagnoses.
The scope of practice does not include making a diagnosis — that’s a doctor’s job — but because of their training, these technologists have a pretty good idea what’s wrong with a patient, she said.
The program receives about 300 applications each year for 56 spots. The majority of students are offered jobs before they’ve even started their nine-month placements. The pay ranges from a starting rate of $27 an hour up to $38 or $40, and depends whether the job is in a hospital, a government lab, or a private lab.
Michigan hospitals regularly recruit St. Clair grads. And demand for these technologists is projected to rise in Ontario, as a bulge of current technologists retire and the aging population places increasing demands on the health-care system.
Dr. Ken Blanchette, chairman of the school of health sciences at the college, said teaching students to think critically is key because they must look at a test result, hypothesize what might be causing that result and decide on additional tests to confirm or disprove their hypothesis. With unusual results doctors may call to ask about methodology, and technologists have be able to confidently explain it.
Blanchette said the program instils a love of lifelong learning, something that’s necessary in a field where technology is continually improving.
“That’s probably why you see some of them continuing on (to medical school), because they believe in it and they do so well at a young age, that they keep moving in school,” he said.
Ninkovich was a good student and flourished in the enriched program at Vincent Massey high school. But she wasn’t positive she wanted to become a doctor because she didn’t have a lot of experience with hospitals and health care. So instead of going to university for science (the usual route towards medical school), she decided on a concurrent program, taking Medical Laboratory Science at St. Clair while also getting a general science degree at the University of Windsor. (That concurrent program no longer exists, but Med Lab graduates who wish to go to U of W get 17 credits toward the 30 credits required for a degree.)
The program attracted Ninkovich because it involved the sciences — chemistry and biology — she enjoyed in high school.
“What was nice about the college program is it’s hands-on and you get early hospital exposure with that,” she said.
After graduating, she worked part time at the hospital as a lab assistant for a year while pursuing a second degree at the U of W in biology. Then she attended McMaster University medical school, a program that involves group-based learning. In her group, she became a good resource for information about medical testing, she said. She could explain the significance of the tests, how they’re done and the risk of false positives and false negatives.
“There are probably easier ways to get into medical school, but I think I had some advantages over my fellow students,” because of her St. Clair experience, said Ninkovich, who’s in her sixth year as medical director of the Met ER.
You had to study, you had to develop your skills and know what you’re doing. The bar was at a high level.