The Blood Sciences department in the Halo building has undergone a number of radical changes and improvements during the past few months. We caught up with its manager, Naina Chavda, who was appointed to the role last year.
Naina has been rather busy…
Comprising haematology, immunology, virology and biochemistry, Blood Sciences is a large and busy part of the whole Sonic Healthcare UK operation. Naina took up her role last December and wasted no time getting stuck in. Having to learn quickly, Naina started by looking at the department’s metrics and made some adjustments. Speed was of the essence and soon all the department’s AJRs were completed, incident reporting was down dramatically, and there was a renewed focus on people’s training.
Not a place for the fainthearted
“I want to pay tribute to the incredibly hard-working and resilient team,” says Naina, “But it’s not a place for the fainthearted! On Level One alone, we process around 20,000 routine samples a day, and we’re always working to tight turnaround times. There are so many verification projects going on across blood sciences at any one time, people have to be incredibly flexible.”
The scale of the operation is impressive. Taking up two floors, Naina’s team numbers 180 people. Level One operates 24/7 and Level Two is the specialist section where samples that need further testing are processed.
Creating greater capacity
The already busy department is on a mission to grow capacity, so at the same time as reorganising her team, Naina turned her attention to adding or replacing various analysers. Two new wash units have been installed and were up and running in less than a month, bringing the total to five.
A second Cascade analyser was installed to back up the immunosuppressant service, and another analyser has improved trace metal analysis. Allergy testing capacity will also be boosted with a new ALEX analyser, and the haematological malignancy service will be improved by replacing older equipment with a state-of-the-art 13 colour analyser.
It means however, that as if tackling the day job was not daunting enough, there are currently eight verification projects ongoing throughout the department, in which new assays and analysers are tested for their accuracy and functionality.
After five hard working years, the track system has also received some serious attention and has now been reconfigured to reduce blockages and become more efficient.
As well as Naina wanting to say a big thank you to her team, she also wanted to pay tribute to the IT team who have once again worked their magic on a very complicated job.
