Poole Hospitals NHS Trust First in the World to Evaluate the Full cobas® 8000 Serum Work Area Solution

Nearly a quarter of a million people in Poole, East Dorset and Purbeck now have access to faster testing. Roche is pleased to announce that Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is the first site in the world to 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 their cobas 8000 platform.

“Upgrading to cobas 8000 increases our capacity and provides faster throughput of samples” says Darren Jose, Pathology General Manager. “Our current Roche platforms shaved four hours off our run times compared to our previous analysers. With cobas 8000 we are able to save even more time. cobas 8000 also “future proofs” our service against further workload increases. Our plan is to have two cobas 8000 platforms at each laboratory. These powerful and space efficient platforms will easily 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.”

With 183 different assays, Roche offers the largest menu of tests available on an automated serum work area platform and, with 35 different configurations, cobas 8000 provides in-built flexibility to satisfy demands – both now and into the future. This truly modular platform is the perfect solution for the consolidation of workloads in laboratories running greater than 2.5million tests per year. In addition to increasing productivity in the laboratories, cobas 8000 also fits with Poole’s vision for ‘one touch’ sample processing.

“Sample receipt was very labour intensive and slow,” Darren explains. “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 – literally ‘one touch’ processing, which will save much time and effort. We wanted increased throughput combined with time and labour savings – with cobas 8000, Roche has delivered on all fronts.”

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. For further information about cobas 8000 SWA solutions, please contact Roche Diagnostics on their website or by telephone.