? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? With the onset of COVID one of the big challenges faced by many hospitals was having sufficient access to biosafety cabinets for sample handling, due to the unknown infection risk from viral RNA which could be detected in the samples. Many hospitals had to prioritise which samples/tests would be performed. In the absence of spare capacity in the safety cabinets, the only way Lanarkshire could maintain their calprotectin service was to give the CALEX sample extraction device to the patients to prepare directly, rather than sending in a portion of the stool in a pot (universal tubes) for processing by the laboratory staff. Giving CALEX to patients was implemented in 2020, and seemed to work well so Lanarkshire has continued with providing CALEX for submission of samples for faecal calprotectin testing. 95% Compliance The compliance rate for the CALEX has been high at 95%, and this was reported in an article in the 2022 Leading Edge (http:// f iles.alphalabs.co.uk /e-mags /Leading_ Edge_2022_Issue_1/6/index.html). Dr Ailsa Ralph has subsequently distributed two surveys amongst patients and front-line clinical staff to gain an insight into the user experience and see if there was anything that could be improved upon, and she talks here about their findings. Patient Surveys “For the survey we developed a series of closed questions with a scoring system from 1 – 5 with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. There was also a comments section for free text at the end of the survey. The surveys were designed to try and assess how easy the CALEXwas to use, how clear the instructions were, how confident patients felt collecting their samples using the CALEX and if patients had past experience collecting faecal samples with the standard stool pots, then how did that compare with their experience using the CALEX. Patient Responses The surveys were sent with the CALEX to patients who were being asked to do a faecal calprotectin test between May 2022 to January 2023. During this time there were 6312 requests for faecal calprotectin laboratory testing. There were 59 surveys returned (although not all questions were answered in some cases – the data shown is from the responses received in each case). The results indicated that the majority of the patients found the instructions accessible and the CALEX easy to use: CALEX Instead of Stool Pots The Patients’ Opinion Ailsa Ralph, NHS Trainee Clinical Scientist Author - Amanda Appleton, Senior Product Manager, Alpha Laboratories Ltd. 4 Perspective
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUyODc1Mw==