Pathology department achieves international accreditation
They process more than 60,000 test results every day that are critical to making diagnoses and other vital clinical decisions in our hospitals.
And we can be proud that our pathology department is not only one of the biggest in Europe, but also one of the best.
The output of the team has just been confirmed as meeting internationally-recognised standards of quality and competence for medical laboratories.
This follows a comprehensive inspection by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, the national body charged by the government with regulating all organisations that provide certification, testing and calibration services.
About three-quarters of all diagnoses in the NHS rely on pathology testing, which ranges from blood tests to tissue analysis and the study of infections, viruses and the immune system.
We employee about 650 experts doing this work 24 hours a day either in our central laboratory at The Royal London Hospital or its associated essential service labs at Newham, St Bartholomew’s and Whipps Cross.
These don’t just service our hospitals, either: GPs across the patch rely on our labs, as do a number of other hospitals who don’t have the necessary capacity or capability to process more complex tests.
So the official accreditation is a welcome validation of our plans to expand and promote these services to other NHS customers in London, consolidating our reputation as a Trust and earning extra income to invest in our services.
The pathology team was already operating to the required standard, but after undergoing a rigorous three-week inspection the feedback from the assessors has been extremely positive. They commented on the significant progress made in the quality culture of the department, which had a highly motivated team with excellent practices on all sites.
In particular, the assessors said they were amazed and impressed by the low number of technical findings recorded in the inspection, below what they would expect for an operation of our size.
Nicole Gresham, associate director of pathology, thanked all staff who had worked so hard to achieve this excellent outcome, and paid particular tribute to the work of Cliffe Adams, the pathology quality manager and other quality leads in the department.
“It’s not often we have external regulators come into our service and tell us that we provide a high quality service across all labs and sites. We can be really proud that our hard work is recognised and that we serve our patients well with laboratories that the assessors thought are among the best in the UK,” she said.
“We were quite honest with the assessors about some of the problems we’ve had. They were clear that not everything was perfect, but also said that awareness of deficiencies is a sign of a high quality lab. Barts Health is full of dedicated professionals working hard and setting high standards for quality. This is a huge achievement and puts our department in a strong position going forward.”
Simon Ashton, executive managing director for Clinical Support Services, said he had never heard technical assessors use such complimentary language as they had in the feedback session, including phrases like “impressive.”
He said, “They talked about quality management being ‘extraordinary’ and the laboratory being ‘exceptionally good.’ The lead inspector even said he would be very happy for his own blood to be handled by the lab.”