WASP Users Discuss the Benefits of Automation

The views and opinions expressed in these videos are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect COPAN's official policy, recommendation or position. Always read the manufacturer’s package insert for specific instructions regarding specimen collection and transport for the type of test kit being used.

TRANSCRIPTION

Speaker:

00:04 Specimen planting and streaking are critical tasks in microbiology laboratories. Despite the importance of the tasks, planting and streaking are laborious and tedious tasks which take skilled technicians away from analytical and interpretative work.

00:20 The growing trend in consolidation of many regional laboratories into single microbiology laboratories has caused a rise in the number of tests coming into newly consolidated labs.

00:33 Copan’s Walk-Away Specimen Processor or WASP® is the answer to these growing problems in microbiology labs. The WASP® is a revolutionary system for the automatic planting and streaking of all bacteriology samples.

Dr. Bart Gordts:

00:49 Finding highly skilled laboratory technicians in Belgium is a tough job. There are just enough of them around. So it is a real challenge to find the right people and to make sure that they do the tasks that they are best trained for. The technicians were asked to think about the best way to implement automation for them. And it didn’t take very long before they realized that this step in automation would enable them to invest more time in the more difficult jobs that they have been trained for instead of having to inoculate samples for half a day.

Dr. Giovanni Gesu:

01:38 Since we introduced the WASP® system, the opportunity to train half of the technicians at my laboratory means that since last year when we started with the WASP® system, we trained in the microbiology laboratory 14 more technicians inside our laboratory and 7 more technicians were trained in the (?) laboratory. So we think that this is a very huge opportunity for us to change our worker and to have technicians who have trained in different parts of the laboratory.

Speaker:

02:16 The workhorse WASP® truly streamlines busy laboratory operations while standardizing planting procedures ensuring more consistent results.

Dr. Bart Gordts:

02:30 So another important issue in laboratory medicine in Belgium as probably elsewhere is the need for accreditation and standardization and official accreditation. The Belgium laboratories are due to accreditation in the ISO standards 15189. Accreditation requires that each step in the medical analysis, in laboratory analysis has to be traceable. In other words, you have to be able to reproduce who has performed this step, when it has been performed, and in which quality context it has been performed. We were in our microbiology laboratory quite advanced in this traceability because of the paperless system. The computer traces already the name of the technician for each step in the analysis, but there was one pitfall, that was the inoculation. The inoculation was not standardized and not traced because it was still a manual step. Now thanks to the WASP® this problem is resolved because the inoculation is performed by the machine in a standardized way and the labels are put on the Petri dishes automatically so there is no possibility of error. So I’m quite convinced that the introduction of the WASP® will facilitate our easier accreditation.

Dr. Giuseppe Ortisi:

04:12 This is our booth. We have been using it for one year. All our specimens are processed with the WASP®. The system works very well, accepted by my personnel. We can free my technician to other sections of the lab.

Speaker:

04:35 Copan’s invention of flocked swabs has made the concept of liquid based microbiology (LBM) and automation in bacteriology a reality. The instrument ready products allow for the processing of samples by standardizing and transforming them into liquid.

Gill Jones:

05:52 The reason that automation has never really taken off in microbiology has been mainly because transport swabs and such have been in a jar base. Where we’ve had automation in the department is always where the specimen has been (?) automated processing of urine and lots of blood clots systems. The e swab, once it moved away from a jar based technology: the transport swab and it moved into a liquid-based swab with a flocked swab system, this really opens up the door for automation and this is a real breakthrough.

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WASP is distributed in the United States by: ThermoFisher, Beckman Coulter and bioMerieux

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