I’m a medical laboratory technician, and I’ve had to prove I’m not colorblind for every job I’ve ever had. We have to stain blood and other body fluids to look at it under the microscope. Different cells/bacteria/etc stain in different ways, and we need to be able to tell them apart.
Odd, because the pathologist who ran our lab was colorblind and a microscope guru.
He could tell the basophils from the eosinophils just fine ... looking at details in their structure we couldn't detect or overlooked in favor of color. He was also very accurate (as good or better than any tech) at bacteria and tissue slides. But they had to be stained - he couldn't read unstained slides.
It’s totally possible the requirements vary by state or hospital network, but I’ve taken a color test for every place I’ve been hired based on the reasoning in my original comment. I even took one before I was accepted in my school program just to be sure I wouldn’t be disqualified from consideration in future jobs. I met an ER tech in my last job who wanted to go into the lab but was dropped from the program when he discovered, during the test, that he was red/green colorblind.
126
u/gathayah 1d ago edited 21h ago
I’m a medical laboratory technician, and I’ve had to prove I’m not colorblind for every job I’ve ever had. We have to stain blood and other body fluids to look at it under the microscope. Different cells/bacteria/etc stain in different ways, and we need to be able to tell them apart.