Doing now what patients need next: a focus on laboratory medicine

Over 400 delegates attended last year’s Roche Symposium to hear case studies and expert advice, and to discuss ideas to help drive innovation, quality and efficiency. Chris Parker (Managing Director, Roche Diagnostics for UK & Ireland) spoke about the increasing pressure pathology services (and the NHS as a whole) is facing through a demographic shift; a growing elderly population and a higher prevalence of long-term conditions. One of the ways to allay this pressure is by extending the working week, a move championed by Sir Bruce Keogh in his February 2013 plans1 for seven-day services across the NHS. With Lord Carter’s (often slow-progressing) 2008 reforms as a backdrop, speakers relayed personal experiences of consolidating and transforming local pathology services, including seven-day working and quality assurance (QA) accreditation. This report reviews some of the key presentations and highlights the ‘take home’ messages that resonated most with delegates.

Modular analyser best-practice exchange
Previous delegates had requested more user-to-user practice sharing, so Roche organised a best-practice exchange for the cobas 8000 modular analyser system, to discuss improving turnaround times and increasing productivity. First to speak was Kalwinder Ghatora (Laboratory Technical Consultant for Roche Diagnostics, formerly Acting Quality Manager at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham [QEHB]).

Kalwinder first provided a background to the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, which serves around 500,000 people and over 150 local GP practices. Prior to 2012, laboratory services were split across two sites at the QEHB and Selly Oak Hospital, with a processing capacity of over 4500 chemistry specimens per day. When the new laboratory site was being built at QEHB, the trust hoped to align tender processes so that the automation chemistry providers would install their systems into the new laboratory itself. Roche’s proposal recommended two cobas 8000 lines with tracked pre- and post-analytics via a Modular Pre-Analytics (MPA) and Storage Retrieval Module (SRM).