The roll out of our $29 million investment in new chemical pathology analysers is progressing well, with Broken Hill Laboratory the latest laboratory to come online. It hasn’t been without its challenges.

In the lead up to the go live on 23 Octo­ber, months of hard work was spent prepar­ing the Bro­ken Hill lab­o­ra­to­ry for the new equip­ment – from declut­ter­ing the space, per­form­ing the instal­la­tion and val­i­da­tion, all while main­tain­ing busi­ness as usu­al operations.

But just as the new equip­ment was being installed, a destruc­tive mini cyclone swept through the Far West.

The pow­er went out from 17 Octo­ber, and the new analyser was installed as the team oper­at­ed under hos­pi­tal emer­gency power.

The destruc­tive winds are still hav­ing a dev­as­tat­ing effect on Bro­ken Hill and sur­round­ing dis­trict. The town has lost pow­er from the elec­tric­i­ty grid after the winds brought down high volt­age pow­er lines and sev­en mas­sive trans­mis­sion towers.

Bro­ken Hill Lab­o­ra­to­ry Man­ag­er Glen Symons said the team has over­come a lot of obstacles.

“It was a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort from sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal staff, pathol­o­gists and ICT – some very quick think­ing was put in place to resolve IT and con­nec­tion issues as the storm bat­tered the town,” he said.

“We also had no air-con­di­tion­ing dur­ing this time, and even now the pow­er goes out and kicks back in again at reg­u­lar inter­vals as it switch­es from mains to back-up.

“Many of our staff are with­out pow­er in their own homes, but they are still show­ing up to work for their patients and local community.”

Glen want­ed to give a huge shout out to Hos­pi­tal Sci­en­tist, Peta-Lea Collins, who made sure every­thing went as smooth­ly as pos­si­ble, along with the sup­port from ICT, the project team and Nepean Chem­i­cal Pathol­o­gy, espe­cial­ly Dor­ra Aar­vani­tis, Shar­matha Jeyasee­lan, Natasha Mariage, Josh Ryan, Han­nah Babkhan, Cankayan Sutha­haren, Tracey Cam­bourn, Fah­my Bal­ga­hom and Dominic Cookson.

It’s great to see so many peo­ple pull togeth­er to ensure patients receive time­ly results. Well done to all our staff at Bro­ken Hill!

Bourke, Deniliquin and Dub­bo labs are prepar­ing for the new chem­i­cal pathol­o­gy analy­sers to be installed by the end of this year.

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