Nicole Riddle
Shareholder Pathologist, Ruffolo, Hooper, and Associates; Associate Professor, USF Health, Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, USA
Biggest challenge in pathology? When pathology left medical schools around 15 years ago, physicians learned even less pathology then they used to. It is very much starting to be felt and discussions with non-pathologist colleagues are getting more and more complicated as they have no idea what we do, how we do it, or what we mean with the words we use.
Controversial opinion? As a whole, we ”bend over backward” too much. We have historically not stood up for ourselves, and that is a large part of why we find ourselves in the situation we are in, in the US, where other clinicians and administrators don't respect us let alone understand anything about what we do. As a whole, we trend "introverted" (roughly 70 percent). That lends itself to us not even asking for what we need to provide the best patient care, let alone demanding it.
Raising the profile? We need to get back into medical schools, and preferably into nursing school and other APP training. Not the histomorphology, but what we do and how we do it. So many issues happen because people just don't understand what we can do, what our limitations are, and what we mean when we say certain things. We speak a different language and patient care suffers because others don't know it.
