Birmingham Women's Hospital
The Cellular Pathology Department at the Birmingham Women's Hospital provides a specialist diagnostic gynaecological histopathology service to the Trust and the Regional Gynaecological Cancer Centre. It is also a recognised Regional Perinatal Pathology Centre providing a fetal and perinatal autopsy service to the whole of the West Midlands region. We spoke to Tervinder Sokhi to find out more about their experience of using CellNass since they joined us in 2015.
Why CellNass?
The primary reason was because of the requirements of the Human Tissue Authority. We are a specialist hospital that provides a gynaecological and perinatal service (relating to the time, usually a number of weeks, immediately before and after birth). As we provide a perinatal service to the region we handle a fair amount of post mortem material so being compliant with the HTA was high on our agenda. We do around 700-730 post mortems each year. All our post mortem tissue blocks and material has to be stored in licensed premises. That was the big area that pushed us to CellNass as you were the only people offering this.
What have you found to be the best thing about CellNass so far?
CellNass is brilliant. We just give you the slides, blocks or documents to archive and you catalogue all the material. When we have used an alternative storage solution, we had to code everything ourselves. Using CellNass takes out a huge piece of work that we would have had to do. Once the material is off-site it is so easy to retrieve it - you just go online and order it.
Did you find it convenient to arrange an uplift?
Absolutely fine - as soon as we tell you what we want transferring then you quote, and we arrange a mutual date. When the team are here, I know I can just leave them to it. They know exactly what they're doing so I just tell them what needs to go and leave them alone.
Are there any features of CellTrak you find particularly useful?
It's all useful. Everything is archived so all we do is enter the lab numbers and the system tells us if the item is in storage or has been requested already. This helps us to avoid wasting your time because the system tells us we have already retrieved it. All our documents are on there and it has an archive of our activity which is really handy to have.
Have you needed to give us any feedback and how have we responded?
I haven't needed to. Since day one it's been really good. It's the easiest system that we have to work with from a material and documents point of view. Anything going off-site is always quite a nightmare to deal with and to keep up to date, but with CellNass you have peace of mind. You don't really have to do anything. Everything is on the system that you need and when we do send more work to you, and it has been catalogued, we receive a spreadsheet back, so we know what is all off-site. It's all online as well.
And have you found CellNass to be quick enough so far?
Absolutely yes. Though usually, nothing has been that urgent. When something is really urgent, we just ask and we get it the next working day.
Would you recommend CellNass as a service?
Definitely. CellNass provides an end to end solution for off-site storage which is really beneficial. We have found that other companies can only provide half a solution meaning we have to provide half a solution ourselves. As CellNass has this end to end solution, it's brilliant. It takes away all the stress of having to constantly monitor where the material or documents are located. Obviously, with patient tissue, you always want to know it is in the best of hands, and it is with CellNass. Knowing that tissue and documents are safe and secure and can be checked online or just a phone call away really gives us peace of mind.