The Doctor José Molina Orosa University Hospital has incorporated new automated equipment for performing PCR tests, which allows a greater volume of tests to be carried out, speeds up the processing of samples and the obtaining of diagnostic results.
The hospital's Laboratory service has had a new fully automated molecular biology device this week with the capacity to process 864 results in eight hours and up to 1,440 in 24 hours, given the improvement in response times and the obtaining of results that is in an average of 2 hours and 40 minutes.
From Health they point out that the Microbiology section of the hospital center has been "key" since the beginning of the pandemic. In total, they have carried out around 150,000 PCR determinations to confirm the results of Covid-19, some 48,000 samples were analyzed during the year 2020 and about 95,000 during the past year. The new platform comes to "strengthen and facilitate this work" and, on the other hand, "the automation of some steps means that less human intervention is required".
The new equipment, in addition to facilitating the processing of PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2, will allow the Laboratory to process samples of other pathologies, such as HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or the human papillomavirus (HPV), which until now had to be sent to referral hospitals for analysis.
The manager of the Lanzarote Health Services, José Luis Aparicio, highlights that the new equipment “significantly improves the equipment of the Hospital Laboratory service and guarantees the obtaining of diagnostic results in a short space of time, which has a positive impact on the quality of care we provide to patients.”