Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY -- Many students who want to go into health care may consider nursing school or medical school, but ARUP recruiting manager Karen Mata is hoping students will give the field of medical laboratory science a look.
The problem is not many people even know medical technology exists as its own degree.
"Some programs are not getting as many applicants, so some of the programs that you're seeing are closing nationwide at various different schools," Mata says.
Mata says the medical laboratory science or clinical laboratory science degrees train people to do a lot of work that happens behind the scenes.
"These are the extremely esoteric [and] complex types of tasks -- that hospitals don't have the equipment to do," Mata says.
She says this may be the perfect field for people who want to get into health care but might not want to become a nurse or a doctor.
"Some people want to be in health care, they may not want that one-on-one patient contact, but they want to impact patient care," Mata says.
ARUP is trying a new recruiting strategy by talking to high school students about the MLS or CLS degree. Mata says so far the strategy seems to be working well.
"Part of our candidate sourcing looks at school, college fair and high school presentations. Combining all of that together, we have roughly about 1,300 applicants that have applied with us," Mata says.
That's a big jump from last year, when they had 1,073 students apply for training in medical technology; 85 of those students being high school kids. In 2008 1,034 students applied for programs in medical technology, which was up 160 percent from the year before that.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
