Letter to the Editor

Extract

I am writing to respond to Dr McCoy's editorial in the Spring issue of Clinical Laboratory Science [Clin Lab Sci 2003;16(2):66] concerning an entry level Masters degree for clinical laboratory professionals.

Dr. McCoy used the National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences (NAACLS) standards for CLS/MT to make the case for a masters prepared entry level clinical laboratory scientist (CLS).¹ She cites the responsibilities of “… clinical decision-making, regulatory compliance, quality assurance/process improvement, evaluation of test systems, …aspects of laboratory management, and adequate knowledge of research and design principles to evaluate published studies” as evidence that “entry-level knowledge has gone beyond the baccalaureate level.”²

Intrigued, I decided to look at these responsibilities in detail and compare them with the entry-level competencies of other healthcare professionals. First I wrote down each responsibility listed in the editorial and looked at what was required for the task and then looked at the implied level of achievement (using Bloom's Taxonomy levels). Then I decided to see where similar levels of competence/achievement were found in entry-level competencies of other health professions. The responsibilities emphasized in the editorial are analyzed below:

• Clinical decision-making. The implication here is that information must be gathered, analyzed, some sort of algorithm or decision-tree used, and a decision made. The underlying responsibility is that the decision-maker must know what data to gather and what is and is not pertinent to the decision. This is an application-level task using Bloom's taxonomy.

• Regulatory compliance. In this case one must comply with predetermined criteria…