Anita March is the supervisor scientist of eight staff members who work across three shifts running from 7am to 11pm at the regional NSW Health Pathology Laboratory at Armidale hospital.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
She said Thursday’s National Pathology Day was a good opportunity for the lab to put its services out to the public.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand the depth and complexity of pathology testing,” Anita said.
“We're all here providing a service and we just want the public to understand about our job and what it entails and how we’re here to help you.”
She said NSW Health Pathology had the contract to provide a service to all NSW public hospitals.
“So, being linked to the hospital here the primary users of our service are hospital patients. That can be anyone from cases in Accident and Emergency, theatre cases, we have a good deal of chemotherapy patients as well as a maternity service. Any user of the hospital here utilises our service,” Anita said.
ALSO READ:
“We also provide a collection service at Guyra, for our patients at there, and as well we also take referral testing from our satellite laboratories at Glen Innes and Inverell.
“If we have more, sort of, complex testing that can’t be performed on-site, we refer onward into our network to the bigger sites of Tamworth or John Hunter.”
Anita said the Armidale lab was still able to perform a a huge range of testing.
“We have the service to be able to provide a very solid all-round testing service,” she said.
“As you can see, we can do quite a range of bio-chemical testing, we can do Haematology, we provide a blood transfusion service which is pretty comprehensive and we’re the only lab in town to provide that; as well as some microbiology and some stat testing for influenza and that sort of thing.
“If you look at the figures, 70 per cent of the presentations to hospital rely on pathology to make a diagnosis.”
When questioned about how small the lab seemed Anita said she thought the general public was not aware of how sophisticated the technology was.
“And I think too people are not aware of how many things can be tested from a blood sample,” she said.
“We test all kinds of samples, and as I said, we’ve just moved into the field of molecular testing here where we can do rapid detection of viruses.”
Anita said a big capital works project taken on by the government a couple of years ago made a big difference to the NSW State Pathology.
“What they called “harmonising”, where they provided us with the latest up-to-date technology in every department. New automation, new technology has meant the job of a scientist has changed a lot, even in the short time I’ve been working here,” she said.
“A lot of our work has changed from a lot of manual techniques to a lot of automation in the laboratory. A lot of machines are capable of doing the “grunt” work of what we used to do, which frees up our time to do a lot more validation.
“But in turn we’re getting a lot more volume coming through the door. At one time maybe 20 patients a day would have been a big day, these day’s we see 100 patients a day.”
