CLINICAL LAB SCIENEC

CHAPTER 2: LABORATORY PERSONNEL CREDENTIALING AND FACILITY ACCREDITATION 47
A law mandating high-quality testing no matter where the tests are performed
and strict personnel standards is a worthy law. But it was ineffective in the final
analysis for the CLIA regulations. It is an almost certainty that further efforts
will follow in the future to achieve the intended goals.
Competition between Agencies for
Personnel Credentialing
The major credentialing agencies in reality compete with each other in promoting
their respective registries. One of the major agencies that is controlled by
pathologists believe that this particular agency should be the one that regulates
the medical laboratory field, including personnel standards. The other agencies
are somewhat controlled by the medical technologists themselves who think they
should be the masters of their own destiny, and were formed based on that main
premise. There also seems to be a strong sense of self-survival by these registries,
as well as a belief that they are performing the proper service and are the best
credentialing agencies for the medical laboratory worker.
Due to the inaction of the states providing any meaningful regulations of
the medical laboratory, action, by the federal government, through its Medicare
licensing acts, has attempted with its equivalency tests to legislate some sort of
competency standards in competition with the existing credentialing agencies
by entering yet another version of a credentialing examination as occurred in
the 1970s and 1980s. This act essentially made those without any sort of educational
preparation equivalent to a college-degreed technician or technologist by
virtue of mainly experience and basic on-the-job training. The desire for operating
funds and for sufficient political clout through numbers of registrants seems
to have led the registries to broaden and dilute their registry. Through selective
choosing of registries, almost any aspirant for a medical laboratory career can
find an examination for which he or she qualifies, regardless of educational or
experiential level. The sentiment among some of the more cynical medical laboratory
technicians and technologists is that the main function of some professional
registries is to merely collect an annual fee from its members.
Credentialing Agencies
The current array of state licensure and major registry choices available to the
candidate for registry or licensure makes it almost impossible for a new graduate
to determine the best choice for registry if the goal is to enhance one’s career
and to improve the profession. However, if one’s state has a personnel licensure
law, there is no choice as to whether to take a licensure examination to qualify
for employment in the medical laboratory. And it is virtually impossible to objectively
compare the knowledge or qualifications of one worker with those of
another, each of whom may be duly “registered” by one of the major organizations.
This is because of the differences in areas of emphasis or difficulty of the
various requirements for credentialing due to the different levels of academic
preparation and the taking of a certification examination.
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