Karl McIntyre of Liverpool Clinical Laboratories describes the improvements to pathology process and efficiency which have been delivered by a fully automated molecular work area.
Liverpool Clinical Laboratories (LCL) was established in 2013 and is the largest pathology service provider in Cheshire and Merseyside. October 2023 marked LCL’s ten-year anniversary, which was celebrated with staff and suppliers alike. Over the last ten years, staff at LCL have processed more than 200 million samples, including half a million COVID-19 tests. LCL is part of Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (LUHFT).
We’ve had our sights set on the goal of creating a molecular work area since 2015 and finally, in 2022, when the new Royal Liverpool hospital building work was completed, we saw all our existing molecular infection equipment moved into the Clinical Support Services Building (CSSB) a new building on the Royal site, alongside brand-new equipment in our automated serology area.
But we also wanted to build in a new, automated, integrated laboratory, and that’s where our partnership with Roche Diagnostics came in. The Roche cobas 6800 and cobas 8800 analysers are not new to the market, at LCL we were aware of the potential for these to be married with additional cobas equipment giving tracked pre- and post-analytic capability. Roche helped LCL’s leadership team understand the benefits of an integrated molecular work area and how this could align with goals of service improvement and inter-disciplinary working.
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