Point of Care Testing Data Manager Helps Hospital Meet Vital Data Management and Audit Requirements

Stockport NHS Foundation Trust is the first site in the UK to meet the new Clinical Pathology Accreditation (CPA) standards for point of care diagnostic testing (POCT). Following a 2-day assessment, the Trust has achieved CPA accreditation for blood gas, blood glucose, INR (international normalised ratio) and total haemoglobin testing at the point of care. The assessment team was extremely impressed by the quality of the Trust’s POCT service, commenting:

“The term ‘Embedded into an Organisation’ is too commonly used, but never have I seen it so true as in how POCT is delivered and supported at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust.” POCT Co-ordinator at Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, Samantha Ekin, puts cobas IT 1000 at the heart of POCT. She commented: “cobas IT 1000 has been vital in moving towards CPA accreditation for POCT. It provides access to important information regarding reagents, activation dates for connected instruments and all quality control data. It also has an operator database, which includes dates of certification/re-certification and a record of how often an operator has used an instrument, as well as recording all the patient results.”

“The functionality of cobas IT 1000 can be configured to the requirements of individual facilities. Our system differentiates results generated at the point of care from laboratory results. Each result is linked to the operator who performed the test, the reagent lot number, the serial number of the analyser, the date and time, any alarms noted and/or comments from the operator. cobas IT 1000 gives us a complete audit trail of the analytical part of the POCT test.”

To help ensure consistent and standardised training of POCT operators, Stepping Hill Hospital is in the process of implementing and rolling out cobas academy e-learning, the online training package from Roche. “cobas academy is an on-line e-learning package,” Samantha explained. “This means that operators can log onto the system at a convenient time using their unique operator ID code. This gives us a full audit trail of who is accessing the training programme and what has been achieved. cobas academy is extremely useful for the re-certification of operators. Used alongside the requirement to perform quality control testing, it ensures operators have the required competency and that they receive the necessary updates in their training.”