Abbot Provides the Right Laboratory Solutions for Imperial College Healthcare

The Division of Infection and Immunity at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is benefitting from a managed service contract with Abbott, ensuring an efficient and reliable service for one of Britain’s largest NHS trusts. Consultant Virologist Mark Atkins explained: “The Trust has a catchment of almost 1.5 million people, and so it is vital that all our equipment functions as it should, or a backlog will quickly develop. We have been working with Abbott for many years, and we know we can rely on our ARCHITECT® platforms and other Abbott instruments to perform as expected. The full automation offered by these systems gives us the throughput and flexibility to deliver a high quality, efficient service for our clinicians; the lab simply wouldn’t work without them.”

“The benefits of our managed service contract were clearly demonstrated during the recent merger of microbiology, virology and immunology services into a single blood sciences group within the Trust. Our Abbott facilities manager was instrumental in this, co-ordinating the transfer of equipment so that it did not interrupt services or have an impact on patients. The Abbott team also helped us to develop more efficient combined workflows, listening to our needs and delivering solutions that matched our requirements. For example, we are now running syphilis assays on our ARCHITECT systems, meaning all antenatal samples can be run on a single analyzer, and we can also run a high performance HIV test on this platform.”

Rebecca Stalham, Marketing and Contracts Director at Abbott, added: “A managed service contract provides trusts with a cost-effective, guaranteed service, allowing laboratory staff to focus on high value work which ultimately leads to better patient care, and we are happy that this model is working so well for Imperial College Healthcare.”