Africa’s first automated microbiology lab has been unveiled in Durban. This cutting edge technology will contribute to reducing health care costs due to quicker and more efficient diagnosis of medical conditions and treatment of patients.
The state of the art diagnostic system is set to revolutionise patient diagnosis in KwaZulu-Natal. And it’s the first of its kind for microbiology in Africa.
The BD Kiestra at the Lancet Laboratories in Durban will enable the testing of different medical samples like urine and blood quicker and in a more standardised manner.
General Manager of Becton, Dickinson and Company, the developers of Kiestra, Ian Wakefield, says based on the success of Kiestra in Duban, there are plans to roll it out to Johannesburg and Pretoria soon.
“As a manual method, it’s very time consuming, very laborious and requires a lot of resources to do. What it has done is firstly standardised clinical practice leading to improved quality of results. It’s really setting the tone in terms of the future of microbiology showing that through an automated system you can get better efficiencies. This is just a quote from Dr David Garner a microbiologist in the UK, who says the patients benefit from the accuracy of the results, the reliability of the results and the speed of the result.”
Dr Krishnee Moodley a medical microbiologist at Lancet laboratories says, “By speeding up the results that actually arrive by the patient’s bedside we are giving the doctor appropriate antibiotic choices so he is able to step down from the broader more expensive antibiotics to the narrow spectrum more appropriate for the patient and patients are able to respond quicker and discharged faster.”
