New lab to bring quicker results

Middlemore Hospital will have a new laboratory before the end of the year.

Counties Manukau Health is more than halfway through a multimillion-dollar project to establish clinical lab departments within the Harley Gray Building.

The new lab will be approximately one and a half times larger than the current 17-year-old lab in the Galbraith Building.

The available space is no longer adequate to meet the average 7 per cent a year increase in workload and changing technologies.

Service improvement manager John Peters says the new lab’s set up is a world first.

‘‘We can be very proud that we can be at the forefront of this technology.

‘‘These systems operate at a lower cost and a faster overall throughput for the laboratory which will allow faster and more predictable turnaround times for laboratory results to the doctors and nurses treating the patients’’ he says.

When completed the new facility will accommodate biochemistry, blood bank, haematology and microbiology departments, all of which provide both routine and urgent services on a 24/7 basis.

It will also have a ‘PC2 classification’ which means a higher containment than the existing lab.

‘‘This allows the laboratory to safely handle samples that are perhaps more infectious in a much more controlled way than at present,’’ Peters says.

‘‘Counties Manukau Health has a very high acuity patient load and the availability of rapid diagnostic investigations enables a quicker triage of patients presenting at our emergency department and therefore shorter times before appropriate therapy is undertaken.’’

The level of technology in the new laboratory has not been seen before in any hospital laboratory in New Zealand.

‘‘Due to space constraints it is not possible to implement this type of system in the existing facility,’’ he says.

Construction started last year and is expected to be completed by end of September this year.

‘‘There has been great progress to date and the construction time line is being met.

‘‘But with such a large project some slippage may not be able to be avoided.’’