CLINICAL BUILDINGS


West Yorkshire’s new highly automated pathology centre


A new ‘cutting-edge’ pathology laboratory building at Leeds’s St James’s University Hospital that will serve patients across West Yorkshire was officially opened in September 2023. The highly automated facility will provide pathology services for hospitals across the region, avoiding considerable duplication, and – with the ability to test and analyse samples and then disseminate the results extremely quickly digitally to clinicians across the region – will significantly speed diagnosis and treatment for many thousands of patients annually. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, visited the new Centre for Laboratory Medicine to find out more.


Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust describes the construction of new Centre for Laboratory Medicine at St James’s Hospital – the building was completed by BAM in July 2023, and is expected to be fully operational this summer (2024) – as ‘a significant milestone in regional healthcare’. This is because the 450-500 staff that will move into the £35 m, three- storey building over coming months will be undertaking pathology work not only for the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, but also regionally for the Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust and Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust. In a press release issued on 26


September, the day the building was officially opened, the Trust said ‘this pioneering regional partnership, forged in collaboration with the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT)’, would ‘drive innovation in testing and diagnostics’, while with its ‘advanced technology and state-of-the-art equipment’, the new laboratory building would aim to deliver faster results for patients, ‘irrespective of their geographical location’. Simultaneously, the Trust said, consolidating these ‘essential pathology services’ within a single facility would ‘streamline access to routine and direct testing, while fostering improved staff working environments’ and ‘facilitating seamless continuity and transfer of patient care across the region’. To find out more, I visited Leeds and met Emma Storey, Project manager for the new building at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and a senior member of the ‘Building the Leeds Way’ Programme team. She started in her current project management role in 2020 because – as she put it – she wanted ‘to make a difference to the quality and environment of the buildings from which we provide care’ – and has spearheaded the project from the Trust side. The Centre will be a highly automated facility – both in terms of the equipment used to transport samples to the intended scientist or lab technician


for testing once inside, and then, once the samples reach the destination bench or tabletop, to undertake the testing and analysis of samples arriving from healthcare facilities across West Yorkshire. As a highly serviced facility, the building’s design required some meticulously planned and complex mechanical and electrical engineering. To tell me more about these aspects, Emma Storey and I were joined at our meeting by Alison Ryan and Andy Munro, respectively Deputy Healthcare lead, and Associate electrical engineer, at multidisciplinary engineering business, Mott MacDonald, which acted as technical advisor on the scheme.


Potential locations sought Gathered in the new building’s first floor boardroom, with views onto the nearby Gledhow Wing, we began by discussing the background to its construction, and the key clinical and patient benefits it will bring once staff transfer to it over the next few months. Emma Storey explained by


way of context: “The Trust began looking into potential sites for a new regional pathology facility in around 2018. To date, our pathology services have been split between various buildings dispersed across both the St James’s site and the city’s other major acute hospital – Leeds General Infirmary. Undertaking pathology at two sites, and at a number of other healthcare facilities in and around Leeds and across West Yorkshire, can lengthen the time it takes for clinicians to receive results. There can be duplication of services, some test samples may initially not reach the right destination, and communication lines can get blurred – none of which make for optimal efficiency. Equally, some of the buildings that our Pathology staff currently work in – such as the LGI’s Old Medical School – are ageing and in poor condition, and thus are neither conducive to high-quality pathology, nor a comfortable place to work in.” She continued: “As a key clinical service, we have had the ambition to centralise


The highly automated Centre for Laboratory Medicine in Leeds will provide pathology services for hospitals across the region.


February 2024 Health Estate Journal 53


Courtesy of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust


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