Recently, the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust celebrated a key milestone for its new pathology building with a traditional ‘roof topping’ ceremony.
The jointly funded £8 million development involves a two storey extension to the current pathology building on the Heartlands Hospital site and will accommodate a new centralised core laboratory. It will also house a state-of-the-art molecular biology laboratory for the diagnosis of infectious diseases and genetically acquired conditions.
The team of 400 laboratory medicine and Health Protection Agency (HPA) staff working in the laboratory currently turn around more than 2.6 million clinical sample requests every year for the trust and GPs in the surrounding community, plus public health samples from across the region. The extension will increase the laboratory’s capacity in line with demand, while modernising the services provided for patients and public health.
Completion of the building work was marked by Lord Philip Hunt, the trust’s Chairman, who placed the last tile on the building’s roof. He said: “I’m thrilled to see the progress on the Heartlands pathology complex. Providing an excellent patient experience is at the core of what we do. This new development will allow us to provide an improved service including an increased amount of samples turned around every year and a 24-hour service for local GPs.”
www.heartofengland.nhs.uk