Dr Cillian de Gascun has said work on automation and computer systems should help reduce turnaround times.
Image: Shutterstock/Tero Vesalainen Image: Shutterstock/Tero Vesalainen AN AUTOMATED text messaging system to inform people of negative Covid-19 results is expected to be in place at the end of this week.
Earlier in the week, Dr Cillian de Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory at UCD, said manual errors and a lack of integration or standardisation of computer systems had contributed to delays for those receiving their results. “We’re looking at removing manual steps that still remain – it was appropriate at the time to have manual steps because we were building the system, but these are areas we can improve and make quicker,” he said. “If we have fewer manual steps, we can have fewer errors so you can see why automation is very much our friend in all of this.”
“In normal circumstances, if the NVRL had decided we were going to start texting all of the results from tests to people it probably would have been a six to 12 month project. We’ve had to scale up and make these adjustments very quickly,” he explained. “Sending results by text is not a standard way of working but it’s ideally suited to a situation like there where we have such a high proportion of results being negative.”“I did medicine and I do care about my patients. My staff in here, we’re all very conscious of the fact that every sample we get, there’s a patient behind that, a person with family and we don’t know what they’re going through,” he said.
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