London’s hospitals are rapidly ramping up the capacity of their coronavirus testing lab, bringing in more than half a million dollars in new equipment to turn around 500 tests a day.
The Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PaLM) program, a partnership between St. Joseph’s Health Care London and London Health Sciences Centre, is one of eight hospital labs in the province completing the vital testing — an in-demand service that has left some people in other parts of Ontario waiting days for results.
“A couple of weeks ago, as the Ministry of Health asked us to take on (COVID-19) testing, we immediately worked with our chief financial officer and our lab team to identify what we’d need,” said Neil Johnson, LHSC’s chief operating officer.
“On March 19 we did our first COVID-19 (lab) test. We were running about 45 tests a day. Now we’re up to about 130 tests (a day).”
Even before the COVID-19 threat, the PaLM lab was a testing hub for at least two dozen hospitals across Southwestern Ontario. The lab, which employs about 525 staff, doctors and scientists at several locations in the city, took delivery of two new large pieces of equipment earlier this week, Johnson said.
“Before this, we were sending samples out to the provincial labs, which would take five to seven days to turn around,” Johnson said. “We’re doing it in less than 24 hours now.”
The faster turnaround sets London apart from other areas of the province, where some patients are waiting up to a week for COVID-19 test results.
The London lab is using specialized equipment to test for COVID-19, the illness triggered by the novel coronavirus.
Lab personnel use high-throughput liquid-handling robotics to extract virus genes from swab samples. The lab also has real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) equipment to amplify the tiny specimen of DNA and determine whether a patient has COVID-19.
Johnson is proud of how quickly London’s hospitals and lab personnel worked to get the COVID-19 testing off the ground.
“It’s not just a matter of putting the machines in and flipping the switch. There’s a lot of work on installation . . . quality assurance, staff training and testing,” Johnson said. “To stand that up in less than two weeks has been phenomenal.”
Shannon Schofield, left, the senior medical laboratory technologist leading the London’s COVID-19 test validations and Joe Mascarin perform coronavirus testing at the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine lab, a joint venture by London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care London. (Contributed/London Health Sciences Centre)
Across Ontario, COVID-19 testing capabilities are constrained by a limited number of swabs and reagents used to test the sample. As more testing supplies become available, provincial health officials have implemented guidelines for the types of patients tested for COVID-19, including severely ill people and health-care workers.
LHSC and St. Joseph’s paid for the new lab equipment out of their own budgets, but the six-figure sum isn’t what’s on the hospitals’ minds, Johnson said.
“We know the provincial government has promised to commit more funds to health care. . . . We aren’t sure of the details yet, but we’re keeping track of the costs and we’ll figure it out with the government later,” he said. “Right now we’re not going to be arguing about who’s going to pay it. We just needed to get it up and operational to serve our patients.”
Deputy health minister Helen Angus said the province is willing to step up.
“I would look forward to talking to the CEO of LHSC about that. The short answer is yes, we are looking to support the things that will help us manage COVID-19 in the province,” she said.
“I think the premier has put it really well: We’re going to pull out all the stops.”
The London lab is an important piece of the province’s plan to expand COVID-19 testing capacity in Ontario. Labs across the province will soon have the ability to complete 5,000 tests a day, Ontario health officials said Thursday.
The province is taking steps to get the daily lab test count to 18,900 by April 17, Angus added Thursday.
By then, as many as 30 hospital and community labs across the province will be conducting COVID-19 testing, Ontario Health chief executive Matthew Anderson said Thursday.
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