Plasma viscosity: Musgrove Park Hospital joins the Benson family

Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton is the largest district general hospital in Somerset and is the birthplace of the plasma viscometer. It is from this hospital that Professor Jock Harkness developed the Harkness viscometer, first introduced in 1971, sparking a long history of plasma viscosity (PV) testing by the Somerset Pathology Service (SPS). The haematology department recently brought its testing technology up to date with Benson Viscometers BV1 single-sample plasma viscometer. In this article, Graham Gibbs, haematology technical manager, provides an overview of the important screening service that the BV1 will be supporting.

Musgrove Park Hospital serves a population of over 340,000 in the south-west with 4000 staff. Nearly 500,000 diagnostic tests are carried out annually, with the haematology laboratory processing on average 1200 blood tests per day. Somerset Pathology Service is a joint venture between Musgrove Park Hospital and Yeovil District Hospital and employs almost 200 staff to cover the workload. As with most modern laboratories, in addition to providing a core service, staff members are on hand 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year around. This cross-county service provides all the PV testing for SPS.

Home of plasma viscosity
Jock Harkness work at Musgrove Park Hospital and the laboratory still had one of the original Harkness viscometers for checking very high viscosities when Graham Gibbs joined the laboratory in 1990s. He said: “PV testing was very much a part of the busy routine service when Coulter was marketing the system and the laboratory was processing 250 viscosities daily. Acquisition of the Coulter Corporation by Beckman led to a change in circumstances, combined with staff shortages, which meant that the
laboratory had to rethink its service delivery model. It was just no longer feasible to continue to process such large numbers of PV requests.”