Royal Cornwall Hospital
The uplift process was very smooth and CellNass organised everything – we even get cardboard storage boxes as part of our contract.
Valerie Rodd is the experienced Histopathology Manager at the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust in Truro. She’s been part of the team there for 25 years, and during this period they’ve become regular and loyal CellPath customers. We were delighted then when the RCHT became CellNass’ latest client and were keen to ask Val a few questions in order to discover the reasons behind the decision to adopt the CellNass solution.
“It wasn’t a snap decision!” Val began. “It’s the result of discussion and a fair degree of persuasion on my part over a number of years before deciding it was the right solution for us.”
The Royal Cornwall Hospital serves a dispersed resident population of approximately 500,000 people. Val manages a 23-strong team of staff and they receive approx 35,000 histology samples per year with a varied
workload, encompassing “all the specialities you’d expect in a general hospital, barring neuropathology”. There is a well-equipped Biomedical Science dissection lab, the hospital possesses full Clinical Pathology Accreditation (CPA) and is HTA registered.
The cytology department on site receives over 50,000 vital cytology samples.
With such a large quantity of material being taken, and all of it requiring proper indexing and storing, it’s no surprise storage space was a chief reason for the decision:
“Previously blocks and slides were stored on site, but we were simply running out of space,” explained Val. “We did move the material into temporary on-site storage but in the long-term, it simply wasn’t a viable solution. We looked into those self-storage solutions but there were a number of drawbacks such as no HTA accreditation and a stipulation that due to the weight of the material that it could only be stored on the ground floor, with no guarantee of future availability.”
The process of choosing CellNass began in earnest when CellPath’s Myrna Morgan, Territory Manager, and Colin Brewer, CellPath’s HTA Designated Individual, visited the site and provided a quote for the initial uplift and subsequent ongoing archiving. After that – and having convinced the Trust that it was the best option – the customer relationship began.
“The process was very efficient and CellNass organised everything – we even get cardboard storage boxes as part of our contract… ‘Moving Day’ went very smoothly with good teamwork between CellNass and my team – and Myrna overseeing everything. I was very pleased despite the fact life was made more tricky by a heavy downpour that day!
Since using CellNass we’ve had more retrievals than expected. In fact, we had requests for retrievals when the initial uplift was only just on its way from our site and hadn’t even been indexed yet!
I thought this might prove problematic but getting the requested items back was actually very efficient and accurate. We’ve sent 25 years worth of stored blocks/slides to CellNass (with the most recent 5-years staying here at the RCHT) and I’m pleased the future storage of our material has been resolved and confident we’ll benefit from an efficient and reliable service”.
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