laboratory

Over the last few weeks our customer services team have been out visiting practices around the Auckland region. In the next month or so they will have visited every practice in the region, building relationships with the clinicians and staff they will be working with daily and answering as many of their questions as possible.

At the end of week one of service in Auckland and week three in Counties Manukau, I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone working here at Labtests.

Since we took up service in Counties Manukau a week ago, our laboratory has completed processing and reporting on over 50,000 tests.

At the end of day two, I’m pleased with Labtests’ overall performance across the Counties Manukau service.

Last week we were very pleased to welcome to Labtests five Heads of Department from Healthscope’s leading Australian laboratories. They were here to peer-review the systems and operational processes we now have in place in preparation for service transition next month.

Next Monday will mark an important milestone in the Labtests recruitment programme, as 100 of our new laboratory staff gather for their team induction day. This group of highly qualified scientific, technical, data entry and call centre staff is the first of two major intakes of laboratory staff and will make up the ‘nucleus’ of our lab team.

In the course of my work meeting with the Auckland healthcare community, people sometimes remark at the enormity of the task facing Labtests as we prepare to take over the community pathology contract from DML.

The Auckland Regional District Health Boards (ARDHBs) have concluded the consultation process regarding community laboratory testing services in the Auckland region. This is the first consultation within the region to cover such a broad range of community laboratory matters, as the ARDHBs sought to gather feedback from patients and the medical community.

Auckland’s community laboratory service, Diagnostic Medlab, has become the first medical testing laboratory in New Zealand to achieve Gold Level certification through the Landcare Research Enviro-Mark® scheme. The scheme helps businesses meet environmental standards and save money in the process.

Eighteen new Labtests collection centres opened across the Auckland DHB region today for Labtests’ first day of service in the district. Patient throughput at the Auckland centres was reported to be good on their first day of opening, with waiting times within target ranges across most centres.

The transfer to the Labtests laboratory of the Auckland DHB caseload this week has seen the number of patient requests moving through the lab double from around 2500 to 5000 a day.

The final preparations for transition have been made and Labtests is fully ready to take up the service in the Counties Manukau District Health Board area on Monday. Labtests expects to process between 8000 and 9000 samples from around 3000 Counties Manukau patients on its first day of service.

Latest Numbers

The total number of confirmed cases of Pandemic Influenza (H1N1) 09 swine flu is 3038, up from 3034 yesterday.

Diagnostic Medlab says the number of patients choosing to pay for their laboratory tests has grown rapidly over the past month.