Questionable work practices
Claims of staff ‘fighting and drinking’ at testing laboratory
The PCR testing firm suspected of botching approximately 43,000 results was investigated earlier this year after staff had been caught apparently fighting, drinking and sleeping on the job.
Concerns were raised in January about conduct at Immensa Health Clinic’s Wolverhampton lab, which was awarded a £119million government contract to help with track-and-trace efforts last year.
Pictures emerged of technicians playing football and fighting, while one worker appeared to boast about drinking while on duty.
The Department of Health promised to investigate the allegations “as a matter of urgency”.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that Immensa’s parent company, Dante Labs, which provides paid-for PCR travel tests to UK passengers, is under investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The firm is run by Andrea Riposati, a Harvard-educated former executive at Amazon.
The CMA is investigating Dante following concerns that it was “not delivering PCR tests and/or results on time or at all”, as well as “failing to respond to complaints or provide proper customer service”. Health officials believe that an estimated 43,000 results came back negative when they should have been positive between Sept 8 and Oct 12 this year.
These are likely to include people currently infected with Covid, and therefore infectious to others, who have not yet developed symptoms.
Last night, diagnostics industry sources suggested that improper use of control samples may explain why the problem took so long to come to light.
This is where a sample that is already known to be positive is included in a batch to ensure the testing is working properly. They also said staff may have allowed samples to deteriorate.
“Degradation can happen in samples that are stored or processed incorrectly, for example if a technician added the wrong or incorrect concentrations of chemicals during preparation, or if they were allowed to sit too long out of cold storage before processing,” a source said.
“If samples were ever lost or delayed at any point, this is possible.”
David Wells, the chief executive of the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS), said: “The IBMS expects any workforce undertaking diagnostic testing for Covid-19 to meet the same minimum requirements as any other medical laboratory workforce that is involved in diagnostic testing.”
After the initial £119million testing contract, Immensa won a £50 million government deal for laboratory-testing services in August, followed by a £12.3 million contract for genomic sequencing.
Mr Riposati is listed as Immensa’s sole director and owns 75 per cent or more of the company.
“We are fully collaborating with UKHSA on this matter,” he said.