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Show fiiGgMlatioEis tart ifeStk !i63piJals U.S. Senator Jake Garn announced he would fight proposed HEW regulations which could seriously hurt Utah's rural hospitals and increase health care costs. Garn is co -sponsoring a joint resolution preventing HEW from implementing uniform educational qualifications qualifi-cations for laboratory personnel. per-sonnel. The regulations would apply ap-ply to all technical personnel person-nel in clinical laboratories, requiring them to fulfill extensive ex-tensive certification standards. stan-dards. HEW claims that if certain types of lab personnel person-nel do not meet these levels the quality of laboratory tests would be compromised. "Utah's hospitals currently cur-rently have an excellent system sys-tem which provides quality laboratory services at a reasonable rea-sonable cost. They rely on several fully trained technologists, tech-nologists, and an extensive consulting network including includ-ing Utah's major urban hospitals. hos-pitals. If these regulations were enforced, the rural laboratories lab-oratories would face possible pos-sible closures, and many Utahns would be denied basic health care they now receive. "Smaller hospitals now rely on personnel straight out of school who are willing will-ing to gain experience working work-ing in a rural area before they apply to larger hospitals. hos-pitals. Rural hospitals should not be forced to com -pete with the urban centers for the limited pool of technologists tech-nologists who have the postgraduate post-graduate education that HEW intends to require." "HEW is assuming that a small rural hospital can operate op-erate its lab service with the same procedures and facilities fa-cilities as a large urban hospital. This is unreasonable, unreason-able, and would drastically affect many Utah hospitals." "There must be a necessary neces-sary distinction between realistically high personnel person-nel standards, and regulation for the sake of regulation," said Garn. |
