Shafqat Tahir
Laboratory Manager and Biosafety Officer
Do you remember being in school and working in the lab? You would wear a lab coat and safety goggles and put reagents in potatoes and it would turn black or blue? All of those chemical reactions and end products really fascinated me. I met my husband in undergrad school and he’s a lab manager, too. People used to think we were crazy looking under the microscope all the time, but looking at Reed-Sternberg cells and microorganisms fascinated us. I knew I wanted to live my life in the lab.
As the Quality and Risk Manager for the Lab department, my role is to make sure that we produce accurate and reliable results in a timely manner. I’m also the Biosafety/Biosecurity Officer for the whole department. Biological safety is about preventing harm to people from pathogens, and biosecurity is about protecting the pathogen from people so they are not used for bio-terrorism.
We always knew that 80 per cent of medical decisions are based on laboratory results. But it’s just so good to see that the world is now realizing how important laboratory science is.
When we first heard about COVID-19, it was like my worlds collided. I knew I’d have to work at least 12 hour days to find a safe balance between the two activities. How do I balance both my jobs while not cutting corners on quality and not cutting corners on safety? It was challenging, I was overwhelmed, but more than anything, I was determined. And not just me, my whole team. I’m not exaggerating when I say medical microbiologists worked around the clock to provide the knowledge that helped us set up our COVID-19 lab and do our job safely.
We always knew that 80 per cent of medical decisions are based on laboratory results. But it’s just so good to see that the world is now realizing how important laboratory science is.
COVID-19 is considered a Risk Group 3 Pathogen. There are special procedures for even opening the specimen. It has to be done in a very safe manner. I’m proud to say we have not had a single case of lab-acquired COVID-19 infection, and that’s because of all the hard work and risk-assessments we did in the beginning to put safe processes in place when handling COVID-19 specimens. We were scared, we didn’t know a lot about the virus back then, but we worked hard.
Frontline staff can’t do their jobs until we tell them if their patients are negative or positive for COVID-19. That’s a lot of responsibility – to ensure we do not give a false positive or negative result.
I’m used to working under stress, but this has been a different kind of stress. If I missed anything or did anything wrong or improper, I could jeopardize my staff’s safety, not just fail accreditation or quality of results. I was scared that if I didn’t do a risk assessment properly, one of my staff could get sick.
The pandemic has helped me build capacity to tolerate stress, I feel I’m now able to function in a very stressful situation and it’s showed me how much endurance I have. With that mindset, you’ll do things you never thought you could do.
Shafqat Tahir is a Quality and Risk Manager and Biosafety/Biosecurity Officer at St. Michael’s Hospital.
As told to Jennifer Stranges. Photos by Yuri Markarov. This interview has been edited and condensed.