Football personality Gary Lineker has opened the pathology laboratories and clinical haematology unit of St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey
Football personality Gary Lineker has opened the pathology laboratories and clinical haematology unit of St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey, Surrey, where the Department of Haematology recently awarded the haematology contract for the Ashford and St Peter's NHS Trust to ABX Diagnostics following a rigorous tender process.
St Peter's has purchased a Pentra 120 and Pentra 120 Retic and SPS (slide preparation system) and a STV data manager to manage the data from the linked Pentras.
Ashford will receive one of the newly launched Pentra 80s and a Pentra 120 Retic and STV.
One of the key reasons for ABX's success, the company says, was that it is the only manufacturer able to provide a range of haematology analysers that uses identical technology, thereby addressing the individual requirements of both hospitals while offering advantages for training and reagent stock control and management.
Another major factor in ABX's success was reliability, and the Pentra Retic analysers have the longest mean time between failure (MTBF) record on the market. MTBF is a long established industry marker used by all companies to measure the performance of haematology systems.
"With our throughput, we cannot afford for our analysers to be out of action for any length of time" said Tony Newman-Smith, lead biomedical scientist.
"ABX provided us with all the necessary data to show their reliability and also a list of hospitals using ABX analysers which I could call for an impartial assessment.
However I wanted to ask my own contacts for their opinion and when I spoke with them it became clear that the ABX Pentra analysers were extremely reliable." The Trust currently has a turnover over of approximately 250,000 full blood counts per annum with an annual workload increase of 10% and ABX were able to demonstrate the capacity of the Pentra instrumentation to respond to the every increasing demands.
Users confirmed that the Pentra analysers provided ample capacity to provide a 24-hour service.
With four analysers and associated software and slide maker it was a significant decision by St Peter's to switch to ABX for all its haematology requirements.
Commenting on the success, Cleve Wright, UK manager ABX Diagnostics said "This order comes on the back of other significant tender wins throughout the UK and we are succeeding because of a package of benefits that makes ABX stand out - a combination of innovative patented technology, virtually zero maintenance analysers, proven reference methodologies, accurate high quality results and first class customer support offering laboratories the tools to report confident clinical diagnosis".
