Claire Paterson is Chief Biomedical Scientist at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where she leads the Routine Automation Team in the Clinical Biochemistry Laboratory. Within the last year, the team there has implemented a number of changes to improve their calprotectin testing service. Claire talks to Amanda Appleton, Senior Product Manager, about how things have moved on.
The Background:
“Aberdeen Royal Infirmary is the largest hospital in NHS Grampian covering a huge geographical area, and calprotectin testing for the whole region is performed here. The area extends up as far as Forres and down past Stonehaven, which includes over 90 GP practices. We are currently running around 200 – 250 calprotectin tests per week and until the start of 2024 we were using the Alegria® ELISA based method (Orgentec). We have used this since the assay was first introduced, around ten years ago. However, we have had a significant increase in the volume of calprotectin requests and since the contract was coming to an end, we wanted to look at
something that would improve efficiency.
The Alegria is limited to 30 samples per run, so we were running it three times a week. However, we would rarely keep on top of demands. The extraction process was extremely time consuming. Faecal samples were supplied to us in pots which we had to pick, we were manually pipetting the buffer into the tubes, then they would go onto a roller/mixer for 30 minutes. After this we had to vortex, centrifuge and manually pipette from the tubes onto the ELISA plates. This occupied a BMS (Band 5 or 6) all afternoon, plus the assay also took quite a long time to run. The Alegria wasn’t interfaced, so once generated, the results would need to be manually
transcribed, then transferred into APEX (middleware system) and verified by another member of staff, before they could be reported. There was also only one other user on the EQA and the results between us didn’t always correlate, but with only two users it is difficult to understand the cause.”
