{"id":5404,"date":"2018-09-27T11:56:42","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T16:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/?p=5404"},"modified":"2018-09-27T11:56:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T16:56:42","slug":"forty-years-of-learning-something-new-daily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/2018\/09\/27\/forty-years-of-learning-something-new-daily\/","title":{"rendered":"Forty Years of Learning Something New Daily"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Joe Evans, Nebraska Medicine | September 25, 2018
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

What do you want to be when you grow up?<\/p>\n

It is the question we were all confronted with as we prepared to graduate high school. Like many of us, Karen Keller didn\u2019t know the answer.<\/p>\n

Fast forward four decades later, and Keller could not be any happier about her career decision being a medical technology coordinator in the Core Lab at Nebraska Medical Center. Keller celebrated her 40th service anniversary with the organization on Sept. 5.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been treated well here and have had wonderful managers and colleagues throughout my 40 years,\u201d says Keller. \u201cWhenever that day comes for me to retire, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m going to do \u2013 this is my identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Impassioned words from someone who initially did not know what the medical technology field was when her Westside High School guidance counselor first suggested it as a potential career.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy counselor asked what classes in school I liked, and I told her the ones with labs. She suggested I go into medical technology, which I had never heard of,\u201d says Keller. \u201cI researched the career and it sounded exactly like what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keller graduated from the then medical technology program at UNMC in 1978 and started her first job as a bench tech at Clarkson Hospital in September of that year. She would later experience the changes to Nebraska Health System, The Nebraska Medical Center and now Nebraska Medicine. While the organization names changed, so did Keller\u2019s job titles. She began as a medical technologist then her area of work became known as Clinical Laboratory Science and it is now Medical Laboratory Science.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough all those name changes, I still do the same work,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Keller spends her days working on the bench with her colleagues in the core lab, performing hematology, chemistry, urinalysis and body fluid tests.<\/p>\n

Thanks to technological advances and computerized software, it can take only minutes to obtain a test result from a specimen. It\u2019s a far cry from when Keller first started, before computer were implemented. Results were recorded by hand and hand-delivered to the patient\u2019s chart by laboratory personnel.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack then, it could take hours to get a result back to the person who requested it,\u201d says Keller. \u201cToday, it may take only minutes to get results for one specimen, but that one specimen may be behind 50 others we are testing, since we do thousands of specimens daily in the core lab.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to data from the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 70 percent of all health care decisions affecting diagnosis or treatment involve laboratory tests.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are perfectionists in the lab,\u201d says Keller. \u201cWe strive for 100 percent accuracy. It\u2019s all about the patient. We are there to provide a service for the patient, so that is why getting results back accurately and quickly is important to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Keller teaches students her mindset of \u201cwhat if it was your mother\u2019s blood?\u201d when it comes to the importance of accurate results.<\/p>\n

\u201cKaren puts her whole heart into everything she does,\u201d says Kathy Salerno, Core Laboratory manager. \u201cNebraska Medicine patients can rest assured that their care and well-being are at the center of all she does. While we count on her for that, her value extends beyond our own lab and organization as she educates students in the UNMC Medical Laboratory Science program and that\u2019s an exponential impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keller has been teaching hematology to students since 1991 and that has become one of her favorite aspects of the job. In 2001, she was part of the then Clinical Laboratory Science department that earned the University of Nebraska University-Wide Departmental Teaching Award.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe teaching is probably also what has kept me working here,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve been teaching for 27 years and students still come up with questions that no one has ever asked me before. It keeps me on my toes, and I love seeing students grow in knowledge and confidence from their first day of the 50-week program to their last.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keller estimates she has taught 900 students since 1991, and for all the technical skills she has taught them with her 40 years of experience, they have taught her plenty of things and helped her be even better at her job.<\/p>\n

\u201cAside from teaching me what Twitter and Snapchat are and things like that, they\u2019ve taught me patience,\u201d she says. \u201cNo matter if it\u2019s learning something from students, your colleagues or through your own experience, you can\u2019t ever stop learning. Change is constant and there is always something new.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Joe Evans, Nebraska Medicine | September 25, 2018 What do you want to be when you grow up? It is the question we were all confronted with as we prepared to graduate high school. Like many of us, Karen Keller didn\u2019t know the answer. Fast forward four decades later, and Keller could not be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":5405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,50,54,45,46,7,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clinical-laboratory-science","category-deans-office","category-education","category-frontpage","category-health","category-kudos","category-medical-laboratory-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5404"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5407,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5404\/revisions\/5407"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/alliedhealth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}