Hospital and community laboratories nationwide have been instructed to reduce non-essential testing in efforts to conserve reagents, cope with staff shortages and mobilise the workforce for COVID-19.
Reduction in Community Collection Facilities
With the move to Alert Level 4 at 11.59pm Tuesday August 17th, there will be closures of a few of our collection facilities, as follows:
Bay of Plenty CLOSED FACILITIES
Waikato CLOSED FACILITIES
Lakes CLOSED FACILITIES
Please note: These rooms will NOT be opening in the weekends. For any urgent collects required on weekends, your patients are asked to visit the main reception at your local hospital and the on-call service will be contacted.
Domiciliary Home Visits - This service has been suspended until further notice unless deemed urgent essential care.
Courier Services - Unless otherwise notified, our current courier service to your practice will continue.
Reduction in Laboratory Requests
We ask all clinicians to immediately reconsider or reduce the frequency of laboratory tests that are non- essential, discretionary, routine or can be delayed.
FNAs, bone marrows and skin allergies will require pre-approval by a pathologist and will be restricted to only where absolutely clinically necessary.
Venesections testing will only be of Primary Polycythaemia & Ferritin >1000 or as directed by a Haematologist.
We appreciated your understanding and assistance in this unusual time and thank those of you who are already doing this or planning to. This is an evolving situation and further notifications may follow.