NHS Tayside is a publicly funded body charged with delivering healthcare to a population
of about 480,000 people in the north of Scotland. We deliver services to somewhere in the region
of 22 secondary care facilities and 89 general practice facilities. And the main laboratory
facilities are based here at Ninewells, which is a major teaching hospitals in the UK.
Aptio and automation allows us to pull together biochemistry, hematology, immunology, and
coagulation onto a single platform. This delivers a very big repertoire of testing available
within a very predictable timeframe, single input, single output, very lean systems, enables
us to use our people much more effectively, the resource much more effectively, and to
focus on delivering the benefits of the investment and diagnostics to our patients.
The Aptio Automation solution offers an innovative and robust solution to our needs.
Now, all samples go on the track, whether it’s routine or emergency work, but through the Aptio Automation,
we can fast-track the emergency samples. The analysis takes place on the track, the
results are produced. The samples go into storage, and if we need to re-run or re-check
that sample, the automation can take care of that also.
The workload that we have in the main lab at Ninewells is quite large and quite variable.
We process anywhere between 6,000-7,000 tubes per day. Maximum, we’re hitting about 1,600
to 1,700 tubes per hour between two o’clock and three o’clock in the afternoon. Now,
that’s a heck of a big workload to manage, so we need to necessarily have very lean systems
for delivering that. About 73% of the work that was originally
carried out at Perth Royal Infirmary for the outreach clinics, or the general practitioners,
is now processed within the Ninewells site. And that’s being managed with the same number
of staff, and much more effectively in that you get a much bigger repertoire of testing
delivered from this site within a shorter timeframe to our GP’s.
We’ve had a growth of about 4.2% in the first year since Aptio was put in, and a further
6.2% in the second year. So, that’s now delivering approximately five million tests
through the Aptio system, and in a multi-disciplinary format. So, it’s quite a big growth in workload,
and there’s a lot more that it can take. The turnaround times have improved significantly
since we introduced Aptio. Prior to the introduction of the Aptio system, the turnaround time for
a creatinine measurement had a median of around 74 minutes. With the new system, we’re seeing
median turnaround times of about 56 minutes, with 95% of the work actually being produced
within 125 minutes. STAT creatinines, you can turn those around with a median turnaround
time of about 37 minutes now, which is, again, a significant improvement.
CentraLink is the IT data manager system. This is where we validate results. We can
request reruns, request add-on tests.
CentraLink offers us the option of drilling down and looking at each individual sample.
We can look at the route the sample takes on the Aptio. We can identify where any individual
sample is at any time, If we want to route a sample to ADVIA Analyzer 1 or ADVIA Analyzer
2, we can also do that through CentraLink. On CentraLink, we use the sample counters.
These have proved invaluable for helping catch any samples which may not be analyzed in the
correct time The support we get from Siemens is really,
really good. We can phone them 24 hours a day.
They work with staff, support staff, provide information, and their support has been invaluable.
Siemens education and training, the PEP plan, everyone in the lab has signed up to that.
Aptio has delivered significant benefits to us, I think, at this stage, and it’s likely
to deliver us much more in the future. Using the advanced automation, the integration of
the multi-disciplinary platforms enables us to deliver much leaner processes, much more
reproducible turnaround times, it’s enabled us to engage with our clinicians to see how
we can actually start applying diagnostics much better in the future.
Our goal is to deliver better healthcare to the population of NHS Tayside. Aptio technology
is providing us with the opportunity to do that.