Roche Diagnostics has announced that Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will evaluate the full serum work area (SWA) capabilities of the Cobas 8000 high-throughput clinical analyser.
The laboratory at Poole Hospital has now taken delivery of a Cobas 8000 SWA platform, incorporating two Cobas c701 high-throughput clinical chemistry modules together with a Cobas e602 immunochemistry module.
The Trust's clinical biochemistry department, which operates at two laboratory sites and provides biochemistry services for both Poole Hospital and the nearby Royal Bournemouth Hospital, is now reaping the increased productivity benefits of the Cobas 8000 platform.
Darren Jose, pathology general manager, said: 'Our plan is to have two Cobas 8000 platforms at each laboratory.
'These powerful and space-efficient platforms will cope with our high-volume, high-throughput work, and we can also run specialist assays (such as specific proteins and therapeutic drugs), user-defined assays and low volume tests,' he added.
With 183 different assays, Roche claimed it offers the largest menu of tests available on an automated SWA platform and, with 35 different configurations, Cobas 8000 provides in-built flexibility to satisfy current and future demands.
The modular platform is said to be ideal for the consolidation of workloads in laboratories running more than 2.5 million tests per year.
In addition to increasing productivity in the laboratories, Cobas 8000 also fits with Poole's vision for 'one-touch' sample processing.
Jose said: 'Sample receipt was very labour-intensive and slow.
'The Cobas 8000 allows us to fully exploit order communications technology.
'Samples will come into the laboratory already barcode labelled, with the test request already in the system.
'Then, all we do is load the sample onto the Roche Modular Pre-analytics, and it will proceed automatically through the required analysers before being removed, stored or even disposed of without any further manual intervention,' he added.
The Cobas 8000 platform at Poole Hospital will also be linked to the Cobas p501 storage retrieval module, further automating and speeding up the sample handling process.
