Customer training and support are both vital to the delivery of quality diagnostics to the pathology community, as transfusion scientist Barry Hill discovered during a recent behind-the-scenes visit to Ortho Clinical Diagnostics’ European Support Centre in Strasbourg. Ortho Clinical Diagnostics (OCD) serves the transfusion medicine community and laboratories around the world by producing total solutions for the screening, diagnosis, monitoring and confirmation of disease. As a result, OCD assists hospitals, transfusion laboratories and blood centres to deliver meaningful and timely results. As a leading provider of immunohaematology reagents and instrumentation such as the Ortho AutoVue Innova (AVI) automated blood grouping analyser and the groundbreaking Ortho BioVue column agglutination technology system, OCD invests heavily in user training and in its customer support network to ensure laboratories gain greater operational efficiency with their own analysers and serological procedures. Fundamental to this service is the OCD European Technical Support Centre based in Strasbourg, France, which provides both the dedicated in-house training and support its customers require in order to deliver the quality results that ultimately support patient safety, treatment and care.
Twin pillars
Located on the outskirts of Strasbourg, OCD’s European Support Centre is an ISO 9001-certified facility where both professional training and technical support are provided to OCD customers and employees, all under one roof. The centre hosts a talented, multinational, multilingual workforce supporting OCD’s European, African and Middle-East customer base to provide both a bespoke training environment and a state-of-the-art customer technical support network.
In terms of training, the centre houses a variety of dedicated training facilities for the delivery of advanced operator and key operator training programmes in which visiting laboratory customers can participate. This comprises an in-house classroom environment for presentations on theory and functionality, as well as a hands-on, fully-equipped laboratory area that provides trainees with the ability to put into practice what they have learned.
Delivered in seven languages by expert, certified instructors who are all members of OCD’s technical service team, this tailored technical training blends flexible learning options with hands-on experience which aims to focus on identifying customers’ constraints and needs in conjunction with their most frequent work-based issues. The main objectives of OCD’s in-house Ortho AutoVue Innova advanced operator training course, for example, which is accredited as part of the IBMS CPD scheme, is to build on the foundation provided by the initial basic operator training and the customer’s existing initial experience of using the analyser. By the end of their training, OCD customers should have extended their knowledge of the system, increased their level of competence and have obtained first-hand hardware troubleshooting experience. As for the technical support element, the centre bases this on the twin pillars of the Remote Monitoring Centre (RMC) and its Technical Support Hotline.
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