MEDICA® Pro selected for Siemens ADVIA® analysers at City General Hospital, UK

Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics was awarded the tender to provide five ADVIA 2120i analysers, four ADVIA 2400 analyzers and two ADVIA Centaur® XP systems, connected by the new Aptio™ Automation system, the first Aptio installation in England. Both the ADVIA 2400 and ADVIA Centaur XP analysers require a supply of highly pure water, and there was concern that the centralised water system may not be able to provide water of sufficiently high purity, or to meet the laboratory’s need for 100 % uptime. 

Either the quality of water from the centralized system needed to be improved, or an independent, high quality water supply was required for the analysers. Veolia Water Technologies has a long- standing relationship with Siemens, and had already developed a duplex water purification system – an essential requirement if analyzer downtime is to be avoided – that specifically supports automated equipment from Siemens. In addition, the laboratory already used a standalone Veolia Water Technologies MEDICA Pro water purifier to supply general laboratory water, so staff were familiar with Veolia Water Technologies equipment. This, coupled with Veolia Water Technologies’s excellent relationship with the Trust, made the Company an obvious choice to perform an evaluation of the site.

In December 2011, Veolia Water Technologies was invited to visit the site with Siemens to assess the situation, and discovered that the proposed centralised water system relied on a single distribution loop. As a consequence, whenever sanitisation or maintenance of the system was necessary, the flow of water to the laboratory analysers would be interrupted, potentially for several hours. The laboratory handles between 4,000 and 5,000 patient samples a day, and lengthy periods of downtime would have a massive impact on the delivery of results. Clearly, the biochemistry laboratory’s analysers required an independent water purification system.

City General is a new hospital offering state-of-the-art facilities, including a busy biochemistry laboratory handling between 4,000 to 5,000 patient samples daily. Building on its established relationships with the UHNS NHS Trust and Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, Veolia Water Technologies successfully completed the installation of a duplex MEDICA Pro-RE 120 system, ensuring consistent delivery of high quality purified water to maintain accurate results from the laboratory’s ADVIA analyzers. As Dave George, National Projects Manager for Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, commented: “Our long-standing relationship with Veolia Water Technologies has been fostered by the Company being willing to collaborate and to develop the duplex system, as well as having the right equipment and attitude.”