Nicholas Dibdin is the Associate Director of the Canadian Blood Services’ (CBS) Cord Blood Bank and its national Stem Cell Manufacturing Program. Cord blood is used in stem cell treatment. We sat down with Dibdin in Ottawa, ON, during LABCON2018 to speak about his career highlights and the Cord Blood Bank’s mission and goals.
Where did you start and end up in this role?
I started as a general MLT and worked in core labs. I worked up north in Nunavut for four to five years. You get to do everything up there. It’s so hands-on. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. I learned so much. My wife and I decided to come back south. I worked in transfusion in Halifax. There was a job offering at Canadian Blood Services. They were opening a new nucleic acid testing lab. They needed someone to run that, and I had some experience doing nucleic acid testing up north, so I was fortunate to get the job there. A lot of my background at CBS was working in the labs around infectious diseases markers, like HIV, Hep C and Hep B.
When I was working for CBS, I got involved in a lot of projects from a management perspective. Over time, I built up my resume of projects, got project management accreditations and kept studying. I worked my way up with bigger and bigger projects, while still working in the lab environment. My feet were always firmly rooted in the lab. In about 2012, CBS was looking for a senior project manager for the Cord Blood Bank project, which was just starting. It was a new opportunity, a different challenge, but still within the organization and the lab. Thankfully, I was given this opportunity, and I took it! After we implemented the project in 2014, the opportunity for the Associate Director position came up. I was fortunate to be given this opportunity as well.
What kind of campaigning are you doing for donation recruitment?
This year, we put into place a digital strategy for our recruitment of moms. In July, we implemented an electronic registration module so moms could register online in advance. Our staff at the hospital now have advance notice of who is potentially coming through the door and, as due dates aren’t exact, approximately when they are coming.
Our ability to determine who can donate and when they can donate is not an exact science. This is because we are only in certain hospitals, and we aren’t in these hospitals 24/7 anymore. This has limited our opportunities.
Our goal is to try and get as many moms into the program and get as many cord blood units as we can into the bank over the next few years. We want to grow the bank and ship as many cord blood units as we can out the door to save lives.
Where is the lab in terms of the cord blood bank process?
On the collection side, we do have lab people who are collection specialists. The collection of cord blood is basically phlebotomy. In our processing facility, MLTs are integrally involved in the manufacturing process. We do a lot of testing: in-process QC testing, hematology, flow cytometry and stem cell cultures. In the processing itself, we’re handling blood and blood products.
Our managers are MLTs. We have many supervisory and support staff that have MLT experience. MLTs have transferable skills they can bring to the table, and not just in the lab. Their skillset allows them to expand outside the lab as well. Having that background is really important.