Merle Clark

Current I am a Lead Technologist II for our Service Delivery, My duties primarily is to send blood products timely and safely to our hospital customers and other Red Cross facilities requiring blood products from our department. Our duties as a whole, the receiving of blood and blood products. Shipping of said blood products to our customers, maintaining inventory, Temperature monitoring of different areas of the building, shelving of blood products, checking of completeness each order as it is packed and that it leaves in a timely fashion, communicate with order management when there are issues with orders, give work direction and assistance to staff when need, Assist in OJT training of new staff. Take on duties with suspect products to make sure gain control has been performed. Assist volunteer and paid drivers when needed. I have been in this organization for 32 years most of it here in Service Delivery. I have worked for long periods of time since 1993, Starting our In Q&L as a tester, QC as a tester, Components manufacturing and Again Q&L as a labeler and quarantine medical lab technician.

General Medical laboratory duties including the collecting, processing, testing of various blood products and reporting of results to the physicians that ordered them. Duties included testing for microbiology, parasitology, hematology, chemistry general and special, clotting studies, serology, mycology, set up and breakdown of laboratory components, blood bank and whole blood collection and phlebotomy. As an honor graduate of phase 1 and phase 2 intense medical laboratory training, I had the opportunity to experience different lab testing techniques that the average civilian med tech only reads about. I was promoted to Staff sargent with in 2 years and was in charge of our microbiology and parasitology department with the extra duties of training phase 2 students for this specific department. I also trains groups of Wright State University students in identifying various species of malarial parasites in blood smears. When I was assigned overseas to Korea (PACAF) I was in charge of setting up a new microbiology and blood bank department at the new Hospital on Osan Air Base, Korea. It was at this time I was promoted to Technical Sargent. From there I was put in charge of the Mass HIV draw initiative for our PACAF region. Headed by the Surgeon General of the Air Force, I oversaw 30 Airmen to collect and test blood samples from all active duty air force personnel at the various air bases and detachments in PACAF. We tested them for the HIV virus using ELISA. During this time I