VERONICA TEEHAN walks into a fridge and takes some packs of red blood cells down off a shelf. As a medical laboratory technician in Dublin's Mater Hospital blood transfusion department, she deals with blood and its constituent parts each and every day - grouping, screening and cross-matching

"They go every day," she says, weighing two units gently in her hand. "They are brought up to theatre and refrigerated there. Each one is clearly labelled."

The Mater is the country's main centre for heart operations and consequently the lab, which occupies three floors of the hospital, is a busy place, she explains.

Apart from scheduled operations, the lab also has to respond to emergency situations coming through casualty.

There is a heightened sense of urgency to their work when nurses, doctors or interns come to the lab on such occasions to collect the blood.

However, no matter how urgent the situation, certain tests have to be carried out before the lab can issue the blood, Teehan explains. All the same, she adds, "you are very conscious of the patient behind the samples. You can visualise how the patient is bleeding away.

"You get to know a lot about the patients," she says, in particular those who visit the hospital on a regular basis for blood.

"At the end of the day, the results that we are providing are vital, there's no room for error."

Like many of her contemporaries, Teehan does not have a permanent job - though she has worked in the Mater's lab since February.

"It's very hard to get a permanent job at the moment because of the cuts in the health service."

And like many others, she is hoping and expecting to get a permanent position some time in the not too distant future.

After St Joseph's Secondary School in Rush, Co Dublin, Teehan went to DIT Kevin Street.

"I liked science at school," she explains. And it was the idea of spending the third year of the course in a hospital laboratory that made her decide to study medical laboratory science at DIT.

This practical year, she says, "gives you an idea about the work. You are more aware of what you are going to be doing at the end of the day. After being in here for the year I decided to go into transfusion."

The course comprised haematology, blood transfusion, histology, microbiology and clinical chemistry.

In her third year in the Mater, she spent a six-week period in some of the hospital's departments gaining in-service training.

She also spent two weeks with the Blood Transfusion Service Board at Pelican House.

In fifth year, the class divides into areas of specialisation, picking a major and a minor subject. Teehan majored in haematology and blood transfusion, with clinical immunology as her minor subject. "It found it the most interesting of all of the areas. I don't know why, perhaps it's because transfusion is not as automated, you actually do more.

She graduated in 1995 with an honours BSc in applied sciences, then worked for some months at the blood transfusion lab in Beaumont Hospital.

In August last year, she moved to the BTSB in Pelican House, where she worked on the well known "optional screening programme", which was set up to detect the presence of antibodies to Hepatitis C in transfusion recipients.

Earlier this year she began work in the blood transfusion laboratory at the Mater.

Walking through the lab, she opens a door and points to platelets which are being "agitated". Behind another door, plasma lies frozen in a freezer compartment.

"You hear all the theory at college - here you're seeing it in practice."