Workloads of Urea and Electrolytes

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The aim of this report is to assess the turnaround times of Urea and Electrolytes (containing serum urea, creatinine, sodium, potassium, chloride and bicarbonate) analysis in the Biochemistry Department and how it is effected by the different levels of workload that are received throughout the day. In addition it will be determined whether or not the results are still available within the hour turnaround time that the trust guarantees, for the urgent departments such as the accident and emergency department (A/E). This report shows the workload of the Biochemistry department over the past 2 years, the workload for the entire blood science department, the number of Urea and electrolytes (U/E) requests seen over a busy day and quiet day and the turnaround times for the U/E requests received in both quiet and busy periods of the week. I hypothesise that although the workload has increased, even at peak times the turnaround time for an urgent U/E result will be within the trusts guaranteed one hour. The turnaround time will be much lower in quieter periods. Methodology There are two parts to this exercise; the methods for extracting the data for each part will be described separately below. Workload of sample requests To be able to assess the workflow and workload of the laboratory I asked the Laboratory IT manger to help gather some metrics for 2 days, one of which is deemed to be a particularly busy day and then one which is quieter. It was decided to look at the laboratory workload figures that have been created in the past. This data was from 2010 and was easily accessed in the laboratory data system. At first glance it could be seen that generally the busy days were Tuesday and the quieter day was Sunday. The next step was to gather the workload figures for a Tuesday and a Sunday from the Laboratory information management system, Masterlab (LIMS). To do

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