Scaling Up, Helping Out (S2E5‪)‬ MLPAO - The Dish

This month we’re featuring the shared Sinai Health/UHN microbiology lab. Their team went from 250,000 tests annually to providing an additional half a million COVID-19, as well as being the first lab to offer COVID-19 testing without PHOL confirmations in Ontario. If a lab is down for any reason or as backlogs increase, they have offered to shoulder the load and get Ontario back on track and have served Ontarians from Windsor to Niagara to Pembroke to Sioux Lookout and everywhere in between.

We spoke with Dr. Tony Mazzulli, Microbiologist-in-Chief and Infectious Diseases Specialist, Christine Bruce, Senior Director, Laboratory Medicine Program, and Jessica Bourke, Lab Manager, about what they’ve seen change and what they hope for the future, one year and over 2 million COVID-19 tests later.

Season 2 of the Dish focuses on how labs have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are rapidly ramping up testing and overcoming immeasurable odds testing for COVID-19, others are struggling or working on other testing while staff are re-deployed elsewhere. Join us as we follow one lab each month and explore how the pandemic is impacting labs across the province, from the patterns between to specific local situations.