As Laboratory Supervisor of Transfusion Services, Patti Brenner oversees the day-to-day operations of the blood bank at Cleveland Clinic’s Main Campus. Her duties include making sure all the instruments are working, there are no barriers to getting work done, and there’s enough inventory for the scheduled surgeries. She also handles personnel issues. Patti’s journey is a great example of how every caregiver follows his or her own unique path to success. Read on for details.

How long have you been working at Cleveland Clinic?
I just started here at the beginning of September 2022. I began my career in Connecticut as a Tumor Registrar and then switched to a position in the blood bank at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia as a student almost 30 years ago.

What interested you about working in Laboratory Services?
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I’ve been in healthcare of some sort all my life. When I was working at Jefferson Hospital and taking some night shift courses, I just liked the look of their program for Medical Technology. I’ve always been interested in the lab.

What support does Cleveland Clinic provide caregivers in this area in their career journey?
We try to create a career ladder for our Lab Assistants and get them to take more courses or get more involved and go to the Medical Library Science program that we have here if they’re interested in the blood bank. We want to make those things happen so they can go on to get their four-year degree and be successful.

What are some of the greatest aspects of your team?
Just pulling together. With the type of patients that we take care of, this is a very busy lab. It’s not just flipping a switch and turning on an instrument and loading it. We do a lot of things before we can start using that instrument. We all work together, and we have our parts. It’s teamwork that makes us great.

What is a recent accomplishment your team had that you’d like to share?
We’ve recently gotten a new fully automated blood bank instrument called the NEO Iris®. It has a lot of capabilities—it’s doing typed-in screens right now. We’re going to be doing some antigen typing on there, too. We’ve been training and getting that instrument up and running.

When most people think about healthcare, their first thought is probably of doctors and nurses. Can you tell me about the importance of the role your team and caregivers play in healthcare?
“Without the lab,” as the phrase goes, “they’re just guessing.” So, we make sure that the doctors and nurses know what’s going on with the patients so that they can do their care plan.

What is your favorite part about working in the Lab?
I really like the more unusual testing that we do. I came from a reference lab, so I was used to doing very detailed testing on the bench. One of my favorites is the adsorption technique which removes warm and cold autoantibodies to ultimately detect alloantibodies. I’d like to get that operational here, so we don’t have to send that out to another reference lab.

What advice can you give to caregivers looking to get into Imaging?
I would say, “Do your research, look at our MLS program, get your prerequisites done, and if you’re really interested, try and get together with somebody that could give you a tour of a student lab. Get an overview of what it looks like — what a day in the life of a Med Tech looks like.”