Flexible Solutions Aid Efficiency Drive

As a large Trust looking after a population in excess of 800,000 and in line with Government ‘Healthy Futures’ and ‘Pathology Modernisation’ initiatives, Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has centralised a number of its services in recent years. By consolidating all GP work for the four PCTs that it encompasses into new laboratories at the Royal Oldham Hospital, three Essential Service Laboratories (ESL), are left to deal with rapid turnaround hospital requests.

With blood count requests having risen to over 2000 a day, Oldham’s Specimen reception has adopted a LEAN approach, utilising the TQuest GP Order Comms system with samples arriving at the laboratory prerequested and bar-coded. The haematology laboratory has also embraced LEAN, using four high throughput ABX Pentra DX 120 haematology analysers and two Slide Preparation Systems (ABX SPS Evolution) from Horiba Medical to drive process efficiency.

“By working closely with the Horiba Medical team, we have been able to efficiently adapt to our increasing workload at Oldham in particular by ensuring our four high throughput analysers are always running optimally, with ‘turnaround time’ performance indicators running at 98%,” explained Michael Heaton, Haematology Laboratory Manager for Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. “The new Horiba Medical ABX Pentra ML software (V8.0) has also enabled us to adopt a highly responsive approach to abnormal and urgent results required from A&E and our new centralised clinical haematology unit.

Tabs now clearly identify such results early and also allow the useful addition of patient and sample comments as required, which is key under high workflow conditions, enabling us to proactively prioritise them and add value to clinical pathways.”

“I feel that the modular LEAN approach that we have adopted using Horiba Medical technology and the team’s expert assistance has not only increased our flexibility on a daily basis with peaks and troughs in workflow, but also enables us to be ready for future changes to working patterns. I am not convinced that using full automation and track would give us this ongoing flexibility,” added Michael Heaton.