Point of care testing
Rapid POC testing for virus management
Mr. Yusuf Gray, from the University Hospitals Derby & Burton NHS Foundation Trust, talks about Royal Derby Hospital’s robust point of care testing in its virus management programme, and how implementing year-round RSV testing last year resulted in the discovery of an unexpected summer surge in cases.
Royal Derby Hospital has been leading the way in infection control through point of care testing since 2018, understanding its importance not only for patients with regards to safety and how it impacts their progression through treatment pathways, but also for staff, and how they can effectively do their jobs in safe environments. In 2018, Public Health England declared that
flu was rendering the largest number of people seriously unwell since the winter of 2011, with figures showing that more than 30,000 people visited a GP in January as a result of influenza- like illness. That year, 1,598 people lost their lives to flu across the UK.1 Unlike most hospitals, by the end of 2018 when its winter flu management scheme began, Royal Derby had recognised a need to strengthen its defences against the impact of higher hospital admissions, as well as making
its testing capabilities more efficient to enable it to treat flu patients quicker and discharge them from the facility. In response, Royal Derby opted to invest in Abbott’s ID NOW for molecular point of care testing, which at the time could detect Influenza A & B, and Strep A in less than 13 minutes.2 Mr. Yusuf Gray, advanced biomedical scientist,
point of care technologies, University Hospitals Derby & Burton NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We were able to identify which patients had flu at the point of their arrival. This meant that if they were positive, we could get them the treatment they needed and discharge them quicker than ever before. This helped us with bed management and reduced the risk of the virus spreading.” The addition of Coronavirus in 2020 to the list of life-threatening winter viruses highlighted for
many hospitals a need for faster on-site testing methods that would enable them to navigate not only through the winter months as safely as possible, but bolster virus management year- round. While Royal Derby had been working to keep up with the demands of PCR testing to protect its patients, which would take around 24 hours for a result to be confirmed, this update meant that Royal Derby was in a position to begin COVID point of care testing alongside Influenza A & B testing, once it received the updated instrument. Through incorporating point of care testing into its COVID management plans, staff were able to test patients in real time, moving them through the correct triage pathways within 13 minutes or less, meaning that patients were no longer having to be placed inside wards before their status was known. Yusuf said: “We needed the machines to tell us the COVID status of our patients as soon as they came through the door, and that is exactly what they gave us. Without point of care testing, we were having to wait 24 hours for a result, which meant we couldn’t make informed decisions as quickly as we needed. With it, we were essentially one day ahead of the game.” The testing for COVID continued throughout 2021 with Yusuf reflecting: “During the COVID peak in winter 2021, we were able to use the machines to help bridge a gap in testing that Queen’s Hospital Burton couldn’t fulfil during a night shift due to the strain on the microbiology team. It made such a change to how we were able to progress patient pathways through the emergency department as staff were able to make decisions immediately.” However, it is not only flu and COVID that Royal
Derby implements point of care testing for. Testing for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), a common winter illness, was also implemented by the Paediatric team at the hospital’s Emergency Department in 2021, to help quickly identify if patients had RSV. Then in 2022, as winter made way to spring, the hospital made
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www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I August 2023
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