Looking forward to 2012

(Aotea News, December 2011)

Dr Karen Wood, Chief Executive, Aotea Pathology

As Christmas draws near, we are busy at Aotea with projects that will help lead us into 2012 with an ongoing focus on improving systems and facilities for patients.

In this edition of Aotea News, you can read about two of these projects: our moves to better premises for collection rooms and our implementation of eLab in primary care practices.

We have had good feedback so far about eLab and how straightforward it is to use, which is pleasing. We have ongoing user support for everyone and extensive paper-based and online user guides to read, when you need them.

Thanks very much for your recent feedback about our services in our annual referrer survey. An article over the page has the numbers in more detail, and it is great to see an increase to a 95 per cent ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ rate for our overall service.

A key part of the survey is assessing all the suggestions you make for improvements to our service, and we are going through that process at the moment.

You will notice that this edition of Aotea News does not include clinical information. This is because we are trialling two newsletters for clinicians and their practices focusing alternatively on clinical or service issues.

This one focuses on practice management news and information -- the type of information useful for your  everyday use of pathology services by your organisation.

The second one is to be written mainly by our pathologists and will provide specialist information more directly useful for clinical work.

We hope these new formats give you information that is more clearly relevant to the tasks you need it for.

Have a very relaxing Christmas break and I look forward to working with you again in 2012.