Sickle cell screen

This week, we marked the 7th annual Biomedical Science Day with stands at St George’s, St Helier and Croydon university hospitals highlighting the amazing and vital work that biomedical scientists do to support our patients.

South West London Pathology (SWLP) has been working with bioMerieux to set up and interface Virtuo incubators at Croydon University Hospital (CUH) so that blood culture samples for sepsis can be incubated on site within the national target time of four hours.

On Wednesday (4 April), the Croydon blood transfusion service went live with the Immucor system. Immucor is the leading provider of transfusion and transplantation diagnostic products in the UK. The new system is fully automated and has high accuracy.

In line with national guidance, Hepatitis B and C screening has now been introduced at Croydon Hospital. The purpose of the initiative is to identify cases of these diseases in patients who may not know they have them, so treatment can be offered early.