Meeting accreditation standards for point-of-care testing: views from Stockport and York

Data management at Stepping Hill
Stockport NHS Foundation Trust is the first site in the UK to meet the new CPA standards for POCT. Following a two-day assessment, the trust has achieved CPA accreditation for blood gas, blood glucose, international normalised ratio (INR) and total haemoglobin testing at the point of care. The CPA assessment team was extremely impressed by the quality of the trust’s POCT service in terms of how POCT is delivered and supported by the trust.

Stepping Hill’s POCT coordinator, Samantha Ekin, puts cobas IT 1000 at the heart of POCT. She comments: “cobas IT 1000 has been vital in moving towards CPA accreditation for POCT. It provides access to important information regarding reagents, such as lot number, when first in use, expiry dates, activation dates for connected instruments, and all quality control data. It also has an operator database, which includes dates of certification/re-certification and a record of how often an operator has used an instrument, as well as recording all the patient results.

“The functionality of cobas IT 1000 can be configured to the requirements of individual facilities. Our system differentiates results generated at the point of care from laboratory results. Each result is linked to the operator who performed the test, the reagent lot number, the serial number of the analyser, the date and time, any alarms noted and/or comments from the operator. cobas IT 1000 gives us a complete audit trail of the analytical part of the POCT test.”