GRAHAM — Alamance Community College hosted its first-ever histotechnology workshop as approximately 20 professionals from around the United States gathered in the college’s Biotechnology Center of Excellence.
Histotechnology is a science centered on the microscopic detection of tissue abnormalities for disease diagnosis and the treatment. ACC’s two-year program trains students to prepare tissue specimens for microscopic examination and identification.
The “Getting Smarter Again” workshop April 17-18, sponsored by Sakura Finetek, a worldwide manufacturer of histology equipment, brought lab managers and pathology assistants from such locations as Duke University, Michigan, Florida and even Colombia, South America, to learn workflow strategies and gain continuing education credits toward their credentials.
Workshop activities were designed to be fun while teaching lessons for the participants to take back to their respective laboratories and work associates. For example, a variety of instructional games using Legos and squishy balls led Joshua Greenlee, a Sakura employee from Arizona with 20 years of laboratory and histotechnology-related experience, to talk about changing perspective to workflow and changing from small batch to large batch in laboratories.
“All the workshop participants work in manual, large-batch kind of workflow that can be inefficient,” Greenlee said. “The folks here are from different leadership positions from around the laboratory world, and they have come to this workshop to learn a different way and try to gain some efficiencies in the lab by changing the workflow in the processes that they use.”
Alamance Community College’s state-of-the-art histotechnology department, along with the biotechnology and medical lab technology programs, were the beneficiaries of a $1 million gift from Labcorp Inc. in recent years that was used to purchase high-tech equipment and supplies.
For more information about ACC’s Histotechnology associate degree program, contact Federico Lin, histotechnology coordinator, at 336-506-4348 or fjlin425@alamancecc.edu.
BURLINGTON — A fire severely damaged a one-story house in southeast Burlington early Tuesday.
The fire at 217 Bradley St. was reported about 3:45 a.m., and firefighters arrived to find “heavy fire conditions” in the rear of the house, the Burlington Fire Department said.
Firefighters ensured all occupants had evacuated the house and began to extinguish the fire from the outside. Once the fire was knocked down, they went in to put out the remainder of the fire and conducted searches to confirm that all occupants were accounted for outside, the fire department said.
The fire was under control in approximately 40 minutes.
Firefighters remained on the scene for an extended period making sure all hotspots were out, given the extensive fire damage, which was estimated at about $220,000 to the structure, the fire department said. The estimated value of contents lost due to the fire is $20,000.
The cause of the fire was still under investigation.
The American Red Cross is helping the residents.
As part of an ongoing effort to transform North Carolina’s behavioral health crisis response system, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday a $22 million investment to expand community crisis centers — including opening a new one in Alamance County — and peer respite care across the state.
This will increase North Carolina’s capacity for community-based crisis treatment by 20%, helping to ensure people experiencing a behavioral health crisis have alternative options to emergency departments or community and state psychiatric hospitals when seeking care, DHHS Secretary Kody H. Kinsley said.
“We’re making big changes to North Carolina’s behavioral health care system,” he said. “We’re building more options for the right level of care when someone is in crisis, and better services upstream to help prevent people ever needing crisis resources in the first place.”
NCDHHS’ investment will support five new community crisis centers (called Facility-Based Crisis Centers) for adults in Alamance, Forsyth, New Hanover, Pitt and Vance counties and three new community crisis centers for children in Gaston, Pitt and Vance counties.
Facility-Based Crisis Centers provide short-term inpatient mental health stabilization and substance use detox for people in the community who otherwise would need to go to a hospital.
The new investment will create an additional 60 beds for adults and 44 beds for children, helping to reduce the burden on emergency rooms, community and state psychiatric hospitals.
The department partnered with Local Management Entity/Managed Care Organizations (LME/MCOs) to select counties based on several criteria, including regional data on the number of individuals waiting for behavioral health care in emergency departments and the distance to other community behavioral health services.
The new centers will join a network of 24 facility-based crisis centers in 22 other counties across the state.
More than $130 million of the historic $835 million investment in behavioral health in the 2023 state budget is dedicated to improving North Carolina’s crisis response system. Behavioral health urgent care centers, Facility-Based Crisis Centers and peer respite programs are part of a package of new investments that will advance North Carolina’s behavioral crisis response system by improving options from the moment of crisis to the point of care, DHHS said.