 According to the Department of Health (Feb 2004), one in seven diagnoses that doctors make depend on the diagnostic laboratory work carried out on patient samples, scans and tests. And yet, the work of laboratory medicine experts is often described as the best kept secret in healthcare.
Laboratory medicine (often termed pathology) provides clinical and diagnostic services in hospitals and, increasingly, at the point of care in the community. The services cover a broad range of tests on blood and other tissues required for diagnosis and monitoring of disease to ensure the appropriate treatment can be given.
The fastest area of growth in demand in these services now comes from primary care where around 40% of blood tests originate from. This increase illustrates the changes occurring within the National Health Service in its effort to provide services more quickly and more conveniently to patients.
In addition, laboratory medicine provides and supports services such as phlebotomy (blood collection), national screening programmes, public health protection, antimicrobial prescribing, blood transfusion and blood product usage, local authority environmental health services, education, training, and medical research.
The increasing power of diagnostic testing methods allows more accurate diagnoses to be made and provides higher quality support in decision making. The medical laboratory workload has increased 20-fold since the NHS was founded in 1948 as increasing sophistication has led to increased demand.
Diagnostics now play a crucial role in the cure and prevention of diseases and can provide a major contribution to making the health service more cost-effective - we are now able to solve more medical problems than ever before, and more quickly.
John Hutton, Minister of State for Health introduced the Feb 2004 Modernising Pathology Services report by saying that, “Pathology services are essential to the delivery of the high-quality evidence-based treatments and care which patients receive in the NHS, yet much of the work that pathology staff do is often invisible to the patients that they serve”.
In support of initiatives to invest and improve laboratory medicine and the diagnostic tests made available to the NHS, The Voice of Diagnostics aims to provide a valuable information service so that diagnostics and laboratory medicine becomes widely understood and recognised as a vital part of the NHS.
Refs:
Modernising Pathology Services (Feb 2004) Department of Health
» www.dh.gov.uk/pathologymodernisation
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