I would be willing to hazard a guess and say, yes, people will retire.
Every lab I've worked in have a mostly female staff. If their husbands
retire, there's a good probability that they will also.

I don't get full social security until age 67 because of the year I was
born. Bush & Co. are trying to change it for the younger folks and raise
it even higher. I'm 56 now so I think I'm safe (but you never know). I
still think that enough techs will retire to have plenty of openings for
the few kids that are going into the field. Enrollments in MT schools
now are back to what they were in the 1950's, i.e. low. Many schools
went out of business in the 80's due to the change in reimbursements
from Medicare. This caused labs to become cost centers instead of
revenue centers, and hospitals looked to cut anything that didn't
generate revenue.

I think the big problem is that, to become an MT, the prerequisites
include having a B.S. in either Biology or Chemistry. This entails a
heavy science curriculum, including organic chemistry. Kids today tend
to want it easy and don't want to take this difficult of an
undergraduate curriculum without some guarantee of decent wages. I don't
blame them, but I do see light at the end of the tunnel.

My geographical area used to have 5-6 MT schools at local hospitals in
the 70's when I trained. Each of these schools cranked out anywhere from
4-12 students per year. I would venture to say that many of those
students, like myself, stayed in the area and are still working. There
is now only ONE hospital based school (the one where I currently work)
plus one university based program. Our school only takes four students
per year. I'm not sure how many the local university takes. We also had
an MLT school affiliated with our hospital (a two year technician
program). That closed its doors two years ago. They replaced it with
[can you believe this] a massage therapy program. What were they
thinking????

This is why there will be shortages in the USA for the forseeable
future. Everything here depends upon insurance/Medicare/Medicaid
[welfare] reimbursements, and all the insurance companies and the
government are constantly trying to find ways to cut reimbursements.
This causes large labs to get larger, and their smaller counterparts to
become smaller. We currently do the work for four hospital microbiology
labs - our own plus three others which no longer have microbiology
onsite because it was too expensive to keep running small departments.
Through a partnering of the hospitals, some of their techs now work at
our lab. Specimens are all shipped to us via numerous courier runs in
our metro area multiple times a day. Hospitals here are part of
"systems" now in larger cities. Freestanding hospitals without system
affiliation are getting harder to find locally. Many rural hospitals are
now affiliated with either our system or our competitor's (yes, there's
competition for patients here, too). The hospital I used to work for
closed its doors in 1996 due to reduced reimbursements and the fact that
we housed mostly Medicare and Medicaid patients and had very few regular
medical insurance patients. The costs were too high for the hospital to
stay open. This happened in just a twenty year period. I trained there
in the early 70's, when Medicare reimbursements were paid via
fee-for-service and not DRG (diagnosis-related-group; you get paid a
lump sum per diagnosis, not by the test). The hospital had 350 beds
then, added a huge wing, and was going fine until 1984, when the bottom
fell out, DRG's were instituted, and the hospital slowly died over a
twelve year period.

A local independent lab (not hospital affiliated) kept its wages so low
that they finally couldn't attract anyone for interviews. Techs were
leaving when hospitals advertised openings because the wages were much
higher. They finally threw in the towel in January and raised their
techs' wages by $7/hour! That's an astronomical wage increase. That's
why I believe that wages must increase eventually when the supply
dwindles because if wages don't increase, there really will be no one to
do the work.

Judy Dilworth, M.T. (ASCP)
Microbiology

I think I am still in it after 18 years because I DO find it fulfilling,
and at $21.00 per hour (plus shift differential) the compensation is
sufficient for my needs along with the little bit if extra money I earn
on ebay. ;-)

Yes, nursing WOULD pay more, but I have no desire whatsoever to be a
nurse. If I was just looking for more money, there are other fields that
pay even more.

I guess another reason that I stay is because I'm comfortable..... At my
age, routine is just that. Comfortable. I know my job, I know the
people, I have enough experience to handle crisis etc. ;-)

I can expand my home business over time so I have something to retire in
to.

Despite all the moaning and complaining, there are FAR worse jobs, and
worse places to work for! Early in my career I worked additional PRN
jobs so I know that where I work is not all that bad...... Some places
are pure hell! St. David's in Austin is a good example! When I worked
PRN there, I felt like a random number generator and was almost climbing
the walls after only 6 hours there! No wonder they have hire on bonuses
being offered there right now. <G> They'd have to offer me a LOT to work
there again......

Still, I'm a bit worried about the future with the decrease in
availability of qualified new lab people. It's going to get interesting
here pretty soon!

I think the reason people stay with microbiology is that it's the most
hands-on department left in the lab. The work is mentally stimulating,
and if you work in a large enough lab, there's always something
"interesting."

I think nursing appeals to a different personality type than the lab
does. We have quite a few family friends who are nurses, and their
interests are definitely more "people" oriented than mine. I'm not big
on the patient contact side of things, but that's what they like about
their jobs. I think this is why nurses have such a hard time with doing
QC on POC instruments like glucose meters, etc. because they just can't
get into the technical stuff. They depend on us to do it, and just would
rather not deal with all that stuff.

I agree - being a nurse takes a special kind of person (which I am not).
I am much more at home in the lab and would probably miss it if I worked
somewhere else. Five years ago I tried a CRA - clinical research
associate - position in the oncology department at our local medical
school. The job really should have been given to an RN, as it dealt with
becoming intimately acquainted with the patients' charts, because
information had to come off the charts for the different research
programs the oncology patients were enrolled in. I lasted a month. I
missed the lab; I hated the quiet of being in an office. The learning
curve was at least 2-3 years, and, lastly, the pay was bad. I could have
done it for the pay given if I had enjoyed it, but I felt like I was in
prison. A lab job offer came to me two weeks into the job, and I
interviewed and left. I've never done that before, but the job was just
"not me." I shudder internally everytime I think about that awful month.
I told them at the exit interview that they really needed to hire a
nurse for the position.

I'm curious to see how long all the micro people in our place hang out
before they retire. I'm about five years older than the core group of
day shifters at our lab. It will be interesting to see who leaves first.
Since I've only been there five years I'm on second shift three nights
a week, but I'm the "senior" person on our shift, and my team leader and
I have the most micro experience on 2nd. I don't plan on leaving the
shift for days (I hate to get up in the morning) so I'll probably have a
job for as many years as I can drag my butt into work. We do plate
reading on our shift also, so it does make it more interesting than just
setting up specimens.

I have a friend from grade school who is my age. She's an RN in Neonatal
ICU. She works three twelve hour shifts a week. She said when she turns
62 (6 more years) she's leaving. She said the stress about kills her
now. She said that nursing jobs are easy to come by and she could work
per diem at a nursing home or many other venues for extra money. She
said she's not sure if she can stand the stress of hovering over teeny
babies for even six more years. I think the lab is infinitely less
stressful than that.

Judy Dilworth, M.T. (ASCP)
Microbiology - 31 years