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The Queen's University Department of Pathology and its affiliated hospital laboratories (Kingston, Canada) have operated a successful laboratory outreach program for more than a decade in Southeastern Ontario. The outreach program provides high quality reference testing and technical and professional expertise in laboratory medicine to largely rural and small urban community hospitals. As a consequence of dramatic cuts to the publicly funded health-care system in the Province of Ontario, the environment in which laboratory medicine is practiced has altered irrevocably. This article discusses some of the difficult internal and external challenges faced by the outreach program within the region and...

Remarkably few large regional laboratory programs involving academic health centers exist in Canada. We present a model of a successful laboratory outreach program established by the Queen's University Department of Pathology (Kingston, Ontario) and its affiliated hospital laboratories. Community hospitals in small urban and semi-rural areas benefit from a diffusion of specialty expertise in laboratory medicine and technology, which enables them to increase their local testing capabilities and improve turn-around time. Testing and services of a more complex nature are referred to the academic hospitals. The result has been a steady improvement in the quality of laboratory services in the...

When attempting to dispel the myth of the pathologist locked in a basement – friend only to the microscope and the tissue section – many of us turn to examples of patient interactions. It’s certainly true that there is a place for us in face-to-face conversations with patients, just as there is a place for us in medical education, and in community outreach. But these interpersonal interactions aren’t the only place outside the laboratory where our skills have value – and one oft-overlooked arena is, in my opinion, among the most important places where we can make a contribution; I...