Help wanted: health care workers with a desire to provide critical information to aid patient diagnosis. Bachelor's degree required. Average hourly wage of $28.30 in the Mohawk Valley.

Help wanted: health care workers with a desire to provide critical information to aid patient diagnosis. Bachelor’s degree required. Average hourly wage of $28.30 in the Mohawk Valley.

The position in question is a clinical laboratory technologist, and too few candidates are applying for the available jobs leaving the field with lots of vacancies and an aging workforce.

St. Elizabeth Medical Center has two full-time job openings right now. St. Elizabeth and Bassett Healthcare Network have hired some foreign workers because they couldn’t find enough recruits in this country, officials said.

“There’s not enough schools to meet the demand,” said Christine Goldman, director of laboratory services at St. Elizabeth. “There’s not enough students going into the schools to have programs. There’s not enough students interested, so therefore not enough colleges and not enough graduates to meet the demand.”

The closest program to Utica is at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.

When your doctor orders blood or urine tests or takes a tissue sample, he sends it to a lab technologist for analysis. About 70 percent of medical decisions are based on these kinds of test results, said Susan Graham, associate professor and chairwoman of the clinical laboratory science department at SUNY Upstate and part of a regional effort by clinical lab professionals to draw more people into the profession.

Clinical lab technicians, cytotechnolgists and histotechnicians, all related occupations, also are in short supply, Goldman said. But technologists are the most in demand.

State licensure rules, which went into effect in 2006, play a big role in the shortage, she said. Technologists have to major in the field in a program approved by the state or go to a program after college graduation in another field, which means biology and chemistry majors can’t move directly into lab jobs. It also makes it hard for out-of-state technologists to move to New York, Graham said.

“I’m a big fan of licensure, but I think that some of the regulations that came out of our state commission are cumbersome in a lot of ways,” she said.

Salaries also aren’t competitive to what people talented in math and science could earn in other fields in health care, she said.

“The other thing is a lot of people don’t even know we exist,” Graham said. “We call ourselves the best kept secret in health care.”

In a report on the health care workforce, hospitals across the state reported having the most difficulty recruiting lab technologists, according to the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University at Albany.

“It’s an interesting issue because you think, ‘Shortage? Let’s just produce more,’” said Jean Moore, the center’s director. But the job isn’t attractive to enough people, she said.

“And it’s not like just anybody can pursue this,” she said. “I think you need to have a strong background in math and science. So it’s an interesting set of issues and it’s very different from the issues around, say, nursing shortages.”

Members of the Central New York Chapter of the Clinical Laboratory Management Association have been brainstorming ways to ease the shortage through some changes to licensing requirements and by graduating more students. But it’s hard to create more educational slots because students need to spend time at a clinical site and staffing shortages make it hard for labs to help educate students, Graham said.

Bassett is doing its part to increase interest in the field with a job shadowing program for high school and college students.

It’s not a situation likely to get better any time soon. For one thing, as the population ages, the volume of tests increases, Goldman said. And then there’s the retirement issue.

“The mean age of the current licensed technologist workforce is 55, so we will be seeing the need increase even more over the next 10 years,” said Tim Williammee, network director for Bassett’s clinical laboratory operations.

Students interested in participating in the program to shadow a lab technologist at Bassett for 15 hours, should contact the Central New York Health Education Center at info@cnyahec.org