North Bristol NHS Trust recently chose to award their tender for Pathology Managed Equipment & Consumables Services to Roche Diagnostics Ltd.  As part of that tender bioMérieux UK Ltd were chosen to provide a range of automation as part of the Microbiology solution.  This included the BacT/ALERT 3D system for both Southmead and Frenchay hospitals, simplifying the integration of the two laboratories. Jon Mitchell, Laboratory Manager for both hospitals, explained: "The Trust identified financial advantages in moving to a Managed Service Contract and following an extensive tendering and evaluation process, selected bioMérieux as the service provider for blood and mycobacteria culture. We now use bioMérieux's BacT/ALERT system in both of the Trust's Microbiology laboratories, which allows the hospitals to share the same database for sample reporting and makes it much simpler to check and view patient results across health communities."  

"One big advantage is that the BacT/ALERT uses plastic bottles, which are lightweight and very robust, making it much easier and safer to transport samples from the patient to the laboratory," Jon continued. "Using the same type of instrument to perform blood and mycobacteria culture makes training quicker and simpler which helps to reduce costs. Staff also only need to familiarise themselves with one piece of equipment, which is advantageous when rotating between sites. The BacT/ALERT is intuitive to use - the on-screen display makes identification of positive samples very easy - and it has proved very reliable." 

For further information please visit www.biomerieux.com