Right now, there is a lot of pressure on the country’s laboratories to analyze both corona – related tests and the healthcare’s regular tests.
Ingvar Eliasson is head of operations for clinical microbiology in Region Skåne, and this is how he describes what a normal afternoon looks like.
– People cross and cross and it is difficult for them to maintain corona distance, but here you work very “tight” and pressed at a very very high pace and this goes on well into the evening hours until midnight.
Ekot has been in contact with the laboratories for clinical microbiology connected to the large hospitals in Umeå, Uppsala, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Linköping and Skåne. All describe a large increase in the number of submitted PCR tests, ie sampling for ongoing covid-19, and that it is tiring for the laboratory staff.
In most of these labs, the staff work seven days a week and in some cases until late in the evening and the staff situation is described as very strained in most places, such as at Sahlgrenska University Hospital there. Peter Brodin is operations manager at the laboratory.
– It is on the border of what we can handle now, so try to increase staff and number of analysis instruments and also send to external labs to reduce the pressure.
In addition to the strained The staffing situation in the laboratories is also crowded in many places. They have been helped by, for example, administrative departments and students when it comes to logistics. In Stockholm, Linköping and Uppsala, for example, analysts have been recruited, but there are several laboratories that experience a shortage of staff with the right skills.
In the Uppsala Region, things are going quite well when it comes to analysis of tests. The reason is that already this summer they made sure to hire a larger number of analysts and procure external labs that were prepared to relieve the day when the infection picked up again.
– Without them, we would probably have ended up in exactly the same situation as all other regions, I can almost guarantee that, says Ehsan Ghaderi, head of the department of clinical microbiology at the University Hospital in Uppsala.