Derriford Hospital team wins award for speeding diagnosis
A LAB team from Derriford Hospital has won a £50,000 award for radically improving cancer diagnosis rates.
Staff from the histopathology laboratory have been named a winner of the NHS Innovations Challenge Prizes.
Consultant Dr Dean Harmse, biomedical scientists Madeleine Stephens and Carole Stoddard, and their team attended a glittering ceremony hosted by the Department of Health and the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement in London.
They were awarded £50,000 for their project, which cut a backlog of diagnostic cases from 500 to zero within three months. They also increased seven-day turnaround times for processing tissue from 38 to 87 per cent, and the 10-day turnaround from 48 to 94 per cent.
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Dr Harmse said: "Our innovation completely cleared our backlog and led us to achieve turnaround times well above national standards.
"This innovative way of working has now been in place for more than a year so it shows that it is sustainable. Biopsy results are now available to clinicians to allow them to make clinical decisions in a timely fashion."
The histopathology laboratory examines tissues in order to identify diseases.
Explaining the team's innovation, Dr Harmse said: "We designed a process that ensures flow through the laboratory by dividing the work up into different streams – 'green stream', 'yellow stream' and 'red stream'. This is based on the complexity of the specimen and the technical work required to process the specimen."
A major part of the work involves the diagnosis of cancer and pre-cancerous conditions.
The NHS Innovations Challenge Prizes are run by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.
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