Warning: Heavy memorial post. Sunday August 2nd 2026: I logged into my paid job as a Medical Laboratory Scientist for the last time.
This was the Auslab login screen. It had a separate password to other systems. My username and password was unchanged from when Auslab started sometime around 1997.
After 36 years of actual working, the time had come to hang up my coat and put down the tools. Here are a few of the changes in tools during my career in the Lab.
The burner: went out of fashion due to the gas. They had been known to be accidentally left on all night. So it was a welcome change to move to disposable loops instead of metal loops. You always had to hold the loop down into the flame to sterilise it properly. I always wondered how many bacteria we missed because we killed them from the heat.
The disposable loops were calibrated to pick up volumes of liquid. Urines were plated out usually with a 1ul loop so we had an idea of the growth volume of bacteria ( if any) and this was useful to the doctors.
I spent the last 2 years working only in microbiology where things changed slowly but also rapidly. You could coast along for awhile then suddenly huge changes, then back to very few. We had a few systems from a French Company and I ended up using 3 of their machines. 1 was ancient when we got it, the next lasted many years, then this beauty (the one on the right) turned up while I was on leave in 2024. Only bailed me up once where I had to repeat the cards I had set up. This machine can do identification and sensitivities
(where we would test antibiotics against the bacteria) to see what the Doctors could use to treat your infection.
The machine on the left is also the current best thing in microbiology as it re organised the work flow. It uses a laser inside which vaporises a tiny dot of bacteria, or fungi and reads the spectrograph and compares it to a known database and in a few minutes can tell you what the organism is. The organism does have to grow on a plate (usually) overnight before you can place a dot on a slide. Compare this to doing other biochemical tests by loading into the first machine pictured again overnight. This helps the Doctors to have an idea of what the patient is dealing with. I had an adventure with this machine one day, it decided to not work, I was told it was a sensor issue and needed to pull the side off, replace the sticky tape holding the sensor in and then it would work. Hey presto, it did. A very cheap option to keep a very expensive machine going. The set up bench in between both machines. We now also can do set up at the plate reading bench.
Down the other end of the laboratory were the 3 other sections which I last worked in during 2023. When I first started working in 1980, we used test tubes, pipettor bottles for reagents and note books for results and filing card reports for patient results to send around the hospital at the end of the day. When I arrived in Bundaberg, I was excited to use one of these. A flow through Gilford Spectrophotomer. The previous one I had used in small places were static, meaning you used cuvettes which had to be cleaned etc. This machine sucked up the liquid you were analysing, and made life so much better.
Then we went to semi automation. We had to load racks on this machine called the Integra. It was quite a zippy machine as it had probes that flitted around inside and packed a punch if you had a body part in the way. From there, the machines got larger as more tests were added.
When I finished on Sunday, there are now 2 of these filling up the space. You open a drawer, place the tube in, a little carrier comes along picks it up and then it goes whizzing around the outside then directed where it needs to go in either module. I was quite happy to last use these machines in 2023.
Back in haematology, my least favourite lab section, I found this image of the first Coulter Counter I used. The S model. Prior to this machine, red and white cell counts were done manually in a counting chamber. The errors involved using counting chambers could be quite huge. We do still use them today but for cell counts in urines. For this machine we made 2 dilutions counted the white cells, red cells then if my memory serves me correctly, I think we lysed the red cells then poured that solution into another machine to measure the haemoglobin (a very important indicator of a person's blood volume).
This has been replaced by much better machines that measure all haematology parameters making the job much better.
I haven't mentioned Transfusion Medicine where we sometimes had to race around getting blood ready for traumas in a hurry finding compatible blood for the patient. I found it to be the most stressful section and in recent years, we became pharmacists as well with the dispensing of other plasma related products. I have one of my best uni mates who spent her whole career as a transfusion specialist, not for me. I preferred the bacteria.
Today, I went swimming and have been working in my Fabric Store, I actually thought I would be a bit sad about hanging up the lab coat but it has actually been a liberating feeling. I have written the above as I have been asked to write a brief history of our Lab as work has begun on a new hospital for Bundaberg which means another new Lab. I worked in 2 and a complete remodel of the 2nd to be the 3rd.
The last 2 photos are of the same corridor from each end. This is the current work area sandwiched between the corridor. This leads to the MDU section where covid and virus testing is done. We had to beg some space back from another hospital department to fit that section in. You can understand why they need a new larger laboratory to work in. One other thing I will not miss, they could never get the air conditioning correct. It seemed to hover at 18C and was always freezing.
I usually get my blog printed so I can look back on this in my very old years. Hope you have enjoyed my brief trip down the lane of memories. Next post, will definately be about quilts.
