Every day, our people at Sinai Health demonstrate and celebrate our Values of Service, Humanity, Inclusivity and Discovery. These Values build on our Purpose of caring, creating possibilities and offering hope to patients, their families and the community.
Meet Abiola ‘Abi’ Oduwole, a technician IV in the Biospecimen Repository and Processing Lab at Sinai Health’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI). She is living Sinai Health’s Value of Discovery by contributing to new knowledge and embracing learning.
Amid the pandemic and on top of their regular duties, Abi and her colleagues have been working towards gold star best practices recognition on their quest to gain prestigious College of American Pathologists (CAP) accreditation status. To help prepare for their inspection, Abi volunteered to assist the team in understanding CAP requirements and setting out a plan.
She encourages and supports new ideas and creative ways of working. She is constantly thinking about how the team can do things differently; and even better.
“I see these activities as opportunities to get in there, and help out where I can,” says Abi, who has worked at the Mount Sinai Hospital campus for over 20 years. “I feel valued and recognized and I feel it’s a place I would recommend for others to work. You feel like you belong.”
As part of her duties, she reviewed and monitored accreditation checklists, collaborated with team members on the project build and organized and hosted check-in meetings to review the progress of their action plan. Lab teams process, catalog, store and distribute high-quality biospecimens including anonymized tissue, tumour and blood samples, for specific research studies led by LTRI researchers and other researchers. “Our lab is like a rigorously-maintained and comprehensive library that our researchers can access,” says Abi. With an impressive repository of over 700,000 specimens, teams have processed specimens for over 60 studies to date.
Abi notes that it’s been a haven in some senses especially in these times, to be working with her colleagues, focusing on their continued drive for best practices. The team had a successful inspection. Together, they achieved their accreditation goal.