At the Princess Elizabeth Hospital on Guernsey, two cobas 6000 analysers, linked to MODULAR PRE-ANALYTICS, from Roche are helping the hospital's laboratory increase efficiency and become more self-sufficient.
"Although we're a small, isolated laboratory, we try to do as much as possible
ourselves. We were dealing with an escalating number of tests and when the time came to upgrade four ageing analysers in our clinical chemistry department, consolidation seemed an obvious solution," explained Nigel Turner, clinical chemistry section head. With 183 different assays, Roche offers the largest menu of tests available on an automated serum work area platform, thus providing an ideal solution for the Guernsey laboratory.
The cobas 6000 analysers have also given greater flexibility in staffing. "It's difficult to recruit qualified biomedical scientists on the island," said Nigel, "When one left recently, the reduced complexity of the system meant that a medical laboratory assistant could be appointed as a replacement. And, as the laboratory runs a multidisciplinary on-call system, people from other disciplines such as haematology or histopathology are also required to run the analysers outside normal core hours. Now, it's just one blood tube and one analyser, he continued.
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