One million and counting – Saskatchewan's Lab Services hits remarkable milestone
Recently, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) reached the monumental milestone of one million COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. PCR tests are the gold-standard in the diagnosis of COVID-19.
“It’s always amazing what you can accomplish with outstanding team collaboration,” said Lenore Howey, executive director, Laboratory Medicine. “For our population to reach a million tests is quite a feat for the whole organization.”
A lot of work went on behind the scenes to take the province from its first COVID-19 test on Jan. 24, 2020 to its one millionth.
“Initially it was hard to imagine the scope and magnitude,” said Howey. “Our provincial microbiology team came together to determine the best equipment to purchase and anticipate the HR resources required to set up our two high volume labs with equipment and staffing. Our clinical staff were amazing.”
Watch the video celebration of this achievement: https://youtu.be/zO4EDumG8EA
To set up the lab, Howey said they aligned the lab’s processes with the needs and processes of both the testing and assessment centres and the contact tracing teams. It was a full SHA response.
Saskatchewan’s very first test was done at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. COVID-19 was a new virus and the SHA didn’t have a testing platform in place to validate this new diagnostic test. By March 3, 2020 the Roy Romanow Provincial Lab (RRPL) in Regina did its first test and was validating and releasing results within the week. By March 19, 2020 Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon was doing the same.
Initially, the two labs together were processing fewer than 500 tests per day until more equipment was acquired and 77 more staff were hired to increase throughput volumes.
Over the next several months, the SHA further built additional testing capacity by establishing:
- Diagnostic testing at 16 SHA laboratories across the province on the GeneXpert platform to have most urgent results available in two hours;
- The GeneXpert platform in 24 First Nations communities by working in collaboration with the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg;
- Point-of-care (POC) testing for both clinical diagnosis (PCR tests) on acute care wards and COVID-19 screening in congregated and home settings (antigen tests) so results would be available rapidly; and
- New testing platforms to identify each COVID-19 variant and, later, to do full whole genome sequencing to identify the definitive lineage of each variant.
By Sept. 1, 2020, the province’s labs had the capacity to process 4,000 PCR tests per day.
By Dec. 31, 2020, the number had risen to 4,500.
On April 22, 2021, a record 4,719 tests across all platforms, including GeneXpert and POC, were completed.
“The system response to the pandemic took a lot of energy from a lot of people,” said Howey, who said many people need to be acknowledged within our SHA labs across the province. “Without everyone working to the one goal we would never have reached our targets. Out full teams’ accomplishment is one to be celebrated at every step of the process.”
Howey said provincial amalgamation of the regional health authorities prior to the pandemic helped position lab services to respond.
“Our provincial discipline teams were already in place and they had provincial pandemic modelling and support as a target from the beginning,” she said. “That helped us provide a more robust response without delay – a true demonstration of outstanding teamwork.”
