"If these machines work I'll eat my hat" said a biomedical scientist at Nottingham City Hospital, earning him a novelty-shaped cake when they did
A biomedical scientist at Nottingham City Hospital has been made to figuratively eat his hat by Sysmex UK, which recently presented him with an Easter bonnet-shaped cake.
The hospital's busy diagnostic haematology and clinical chemistry laboratories merged to form the department of clinical pathology as part of a major modernisation programme completed earlier this year.
Equipped with state of the art blood testing equipment, the department's purpose-built laboratory has a fully integrated Sysmex haematology sample transportation (HST) system for full blood count (FBCs), white blood cell (WBC) differential, reticulocytes, nucleated red blood cells (NRBCs), erythrocyte sedimentation rates (ESRs), blood smears and staining.
The system can also provide the FDA-approved parameters for immature granulocyte (IG) and haemopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) counts.
One of the laboratory's most experienced biomedical scientists, Colin Mudd, was rather sceptical about the new equipment and was heard to say to one of the company representatives "if these machines work I'll eat my hat".
It turns out he was proved wrong, and the laboratory's improved performance has impressed the laboratory staff, says Sysmex.
Enhancing the pathology services and helping to accommodate the ever-increasing demands of the hospital and surrounding Primary Care Trusts, the HST system is providing a number of benefits, the company says.
It consolidates several workstations into one, with a simple 'load' at one end and 'remove' from the other, with all other processes automated with safe closed vial sampling.
This helps staff cope with the ever-increasing workload and has improved the overall workflow of the laboratory.
The reliable HST offers fast turnaround times of 300 FBCs per hour, is simple to use, and requires little user maintenance.
Blood smears and staining are performed to a consistently high quality without staff being exposed to open vials of blood.
Sysmex's information system provides a work area manager for automated data handling, and much of the validation and decision-making previously performed manually.
