Competency/Proficiency revisited

From:Lee & Peggy Wenk

In reply to my quick comments about doing competency assessment:

Thanks to those who did a longer version, and more fully explained
competency vs. proficiency.

In my original comments, I forgot to add - there IS no current place for
histotechs to enroll in a proficiency program. Proficiency is an assessment
by an EXTERNAL agency, assessing the entire lab's ability to correctly
perform certain tasks. CAP will have a proficiency program NEXT year, but
there is no agency that has one for histotechs as of today (or any time in
the past, for that matter).

But the person said that their lab manager said they HAD to have something
in place within the next two weeks.

So I opted to show how to set up a competency assessment, which is assessing
how each person's ability, done by the lab itself.

Sorry - I was thinking all of the above the other morning, just didn't write
it out on the email.

I also know that both proficiency and competency assessment are a lot more
complicated than I made it sound.

As I said in my first sentence -

I was skipping how to write a job description, how to break each job down
into all the tasks within each job, how to establish the minimum standard of
what is competent in each task (how fast, how accurate for each task), and
then setting up the tier of standards (meets the standard, exceeds the
standard, doesn't meet the standard), etc.

Setting up the competencies and the standards takes time. A lot of paperwork
time, a lot of time monitoring your staff to gather "numbers" as to how fast
and how accurate everyone can do each part of each task, then establishing
how fast/accurate is minimally acceptable for each task in your lab.

This is what takes a long time. The actually "testing" of someone - that's
the easy part to set up, ONCE the task analysis and standards have been done
and established.

Sorry for any confusion I caused. I was trying to be fast, but ended up not
being too accurate. A unfortunate outcome of trying to rush,  and I fell
victim to it in my reply yesterday. :-(

Peggy A. Wenk, HTL(ASCP)SLS
William Beaumont Hospital
Royal Oak, MI 48073




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