Speaking notes for OPSEU Local 545 president Emily Bartlett
Walkerton Inquiry Town Hall in Toronto
October 29, 2001
Good afternoon. My name is Emily Bartlett and I am the president of OPSEU Local 545 at the Central Public Health Laboratory here in Toronto.
OPSEU represents approximately 400 technologists, administrative staff, laboratory attendants and scientists at the Central Public Health Lab and the 11 Regional Public Health Labs across Ontario.
The Central and Regional Public Health Labs are part of the Ontario Ministry of Health.
My presentation will focus on three areas.
First, what we do as laboratory technologists.
Secondly, the role that our lab played in responding to the crisis in Walkerton.
Thirdly, I will note some of our concerns as technologists.
We are medical technologists at the Central Public Health Lab. We analyze specimens for viruses, bacteria and parasites.
Specimens are sent to us for analysis by hospitals, private labs, health units and citizens.
To work at the Central Public Health Lab, you have to be licensed with the College of Medical Laboratory Technologists of Ontario.
We are an experienced group. Many of us come from working in hospital labs. Most of us have more than 10 years of experience. Many of us – myself included – have more than 20 years of experience in our profession.
In terms of drinking water, some of our routine work involves testing water samples submitted by health units and private citizens.
After the E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, there was a huge increase in the number of well water samples that private citizens submitted to us.
You might have heard Health Minister Tony Clement refer to technologists as “testers”. There is much more to our job than simply testing samples.
First of all, we do more advanced and sensitive testing than the private labs.
They send us the bacteria isolated and we do the more advanced testing. They won’t do this kind of testing because it’s more expensive. So we do it. And we’re happy to do it. As a public health lab, our motive is to protect public health, not to make a profit.
As lab technologists, we’re constantly on the look out for outbreaks.
We observe trends in our daily work. We notice patterns in the results.
If we see an increase in a positive test for a particular bacteria, we question why.
We do more advanced testing.
We act very quickly to find out if there are similarities in the organism we’ve isolated across a group of samples.
When we’ve got confirmation from our testing that there is a trend, we notify the epidemiologists in our lab. They work with the public health units to respond to the outbreak.
We do a lot of trouble shooting in our jobs. Every time we sit at our bench to do a test, we ask ourselves: is this the appropriate result? Is this the result we expected? If it isn’t, we ask: what can I do to make sure the test works?
We want our tests to be as reliable and accurate as possible.
Our lab played a vital role in the response to the outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 in Walkerton.
Our lab in Toronto and the regional labs, particularly the lab in London, received a huge number of specimens from the hospitals and the health unit.
To the best of our knowledge, our lab is the only lab in Ontario - outside of one hospital lab – that does the advanced and sensitive testing necessary to confirm E. coli 0157:H7.
The hospitals and private labs sent us the E. coli 0157 bacteria isolated. Then we did the stereotyping and pulse-field gel testing necessary to confirm the H7 strain.
Our technologists put in many hours of overtime to rapidly identify the H7 strain and to inform the health units and the doctors involved.
Every test our technologists did had potential legal consequences. Meticulous and timely record keeping was essential.
The tragedy in Walkerton made the public much more aware and concerned about the quality of their water.
The volume of water samples that we received from private wells rose sharply. In addition to testing these samples, technologists answered an increased number of calls from the public.
Technologists at the Public Health Lab became an important source of information for hospitals working on their own isolates of E. coli.
Our technologists were a vital source of information in the diagnosis and treatment of these life and death situations.
At the Central Public Health lab in Toronto, I can tell you that everybody at the lab helped out during the Walkerton crisis.
From our data base staff to our warehouse workers, to our technologists and to our lab attendants, everybody had their own important role to play.
I will now close my presentation by talking about some of our concerns.
We continue to be concerned about the possible privatization of our work. Before Walkerton, there was a real concern at the public health labs that our work would be privatized. The way the Ministry of the Environment labs were privatized.
Hopefully, the government has learned something from Walkerton. Hopefully, they’ve learned that public labs are necessary to safeguard public health.
We are a skilled and experienced workforce. Our staff are on the front-lines of testing for outbreaks. We are on the front-lines of testing the suspicious packages being sent in from across the province.
We are qualified to work in private labs as well as the hospitals, yet we are paid 17 to 20 per cent less than our counterparts.
As far as we can see, the government doesn’t appreciate the services we provide. We think they’ll have trouble keeping the skilled staff they’ve got and hiring more staff until they respect the work we do.
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner, for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I hope my presentation has been helpful.
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