Laboratory

There’s an area of Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital (OTMH) that patients never see.

It’s not a glamorous area but it is one of the busiest and most important — a place where diagnoses are confirmed, answers are found, and precious lives are saved.

I’m talking about our laboratory. As you can imagine, thousands of tests are performed here every day — providing our doctors with the answers they need to take the best care of their patients.

Our lab is filled with expensive equipment designed to perform a variety of functions. And today, I’m writing to you about one special piece of laboratory equipment in particular called an Automated Immunohematology Analyzer.

Chances are you’ve never stepped foot in our lab and you may not know much about an Automated Immunohematology Analyzer or why it’s so important to patients. Allow me to explain.

The Automated Immunohematology Analyzer is used every day to perform various tasks in transfusion medicine where we prepare blood products to be transfused into patients. Two of the biggest tests it does are determining a patient’s blood type and antibody screening.

Imagine someone arrives in the Emergency Department at OTMH in need of a blood transfusion. The analyzer is used to quickly determine what blood type they need. It also checks for antibodies in the patient’s blood that could react with the donated blood they receive. It then does a cross-match to ensure the patient and donor’s blood is compatible.

The lab at OTMH performs 18,000 blood types and 13,000 antibody screenings every year.

I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a lot of tests for our lab staff to manage manually using our current Analyzer. What’s more, our Analyzer is 11 years old — more than double its expected lifespan. It has been a very dependable machine but it uses older technology that often requires service, which can lead to lengthy downtime and delays.

Today, we need your help to replace our current Analyzer with new, cutting-edge technology. Automation means lab staff can load the sample for testing and focus on performing other tasks. It means test results can be uploaded electronically and efficiently to a patient’s medical record.

In short, having an Automated Analyzer will increase accuracy for cross-matching blood and provide more timely results for a transfusion. It will improve patient care.

Making this investment now will also help for future growth and innovation at OTMH. As our community grows, we need to ensure we can meet the demands in all areas of patient care.

Upgrading to an Automated Immunohematology Analyzer will assist our lab in maintaining and even exceeding the turnaround time we currently have. And that’s essential when you consider some of the sickest and most critically injured patients depend on this equipment: patients in the Emergency and the ICU, patients fighting cancer, patients in need of surgery.

Your gift today will help us invest in essential equipment for the lab including a new Automated Immunohematology Analyzer. It will ensure we can continue to keep up with advances in technology and ensure you and your loved ones receive the best possible care in our hospital.

The lab is an unseen and not so glamorous area of our hospital. But it provides doctors with the information they need to properly diagnose and treat their patients. It makes a huge difference behind-the-scenes just like your generous gift will do today.