High-speed consistency drives Tameside laboratory’s record efficiency levels

The reporting of critical results is one of the Key Performance Indicators set by The Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath). Being able to deliver a fast and consistent turnaround time (TAT) by any laboratory serving its hospital’s emergency and acute medical services has the most immediate impact on a positive outcome for patients. However, the challenge shared by laboratories both in the NHS and throughout Europe is to keep improving the timeliness and consistency of their results’ reporting while facing demands to keep reducing costs.

The RCPath set the 2012 pathology guidelines at 85% for delivering critical results back to accident and emergency (A&E) within one hour. At the same time, they gave the UK’s pathology services notice that the challenge would be to raise that target to 90% by April 2014.

A year ahead of that delivery date, one hospital’s laboratory medicine service in north-west England has already risen to the 2014 challenge, and easily exceeds the existing RCPath 2012 targets. Crucially, the laboratory consistently achieves this TAT in one hour. Tameside General Hospital demonstrates the winning combination of high-speed automated sample processing, Lean business principles, cooperative staff and the right managed service partnership, with Beckman Coulter UK.