Pros
I love the work. I love teaching the phlebotomy team how important their job is, because they have to give a great sample to the technical staff so we can get quality answers to the doctors to help the patients get better. I care about people, whether they are our patients or our employees I want them to feel like they matter. I feel LabCorp gives me the opportunity to care for the people, to have compassion and empathy for the situations life throws at us. I enjoy building the bridges between nursing staff and lab staff to help communicate the needs they have so we don't have missed stat or time study draws.
Cons
It has been very stressful. I came into a struggling phlebotomy team that had not had much training and who were very frustrated with each other and with Labcorp. I have not had much opportunity to spend needed time on the technical side of my job. I have had to learn quickly to become a great phlebotomist. I believe in leadership who shows by example and does not expect demand work to be done that they themselves have not worked. I went to the floors and worked Swarm with the team of phlebotomist to learn first hand their frustrations and to see what was working and what was not working. I am slowly building a great team. I often don't see change when I confront the other supervisor with issues that are being carried over into my shift. There are many days that I am simply working my butt off and it is frustrating when I need support from the next shift coming in to help with the draws that I get a bunch of attitude as if it is not their job to help. I support the shift before me a whole lot because they struggle to get their work done so when I have a lot of call outs and end up drawing 300 patients in five hours with only four people I need a better support coming in. I need a smile and how can I help instead of the attitude that they need more time to get ready to work because they are still tired. Most days we get everything done by 0600. So, they have six phlebotomist coming in at 0600 to do less than 20 draws. My team is tired, we have all draw more than 30 patients and if I have a lot of call outs then we have draw closer to 50 patients in 5 hours. I have not had the opportunity to work on the benches and help out on the technical side of the lab. We need help sometimes although the technical staff is pretty solid we can get super busy in blood bank with mass transfusions and even more likely now that we are a level one trauma center. I spend way more than 40 hours a week working. I can't get to the supervisor duties as I am covering other positions and need to go home and get on the computer and catch up with emails,timecards, hiring and terminating people and working with employee relations. I have had to learn a lot on the fly. My director has been great to help in any way she can but I did not get much training because in my first week when I should have been given training we had an unannounced FDA inspection on blood bank. Overall, I know most things will work itself out and life will get better but I do need a better work and home life balance.