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Ingvar Eliasson is Head of Clinical Microbiology Operations in the Skåne region. This is how he describes a normal afternoon.
– People cross and cross and it is difficult for them to keep the distance from the crown, but here you work very “tight” and pressed at a very, very high pace and this continues late into the night until midnight.
Ekot has been in contact with clinical microbiology laboratories connected to large hospitals in Umeå, Uppsala, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Linköping and Skåne. All describe a large increase in the number of PCR tests submitted, that is, sampling for COVID-19 in progress, and that is exhausting for laboratory personnel.
In most of these labs, staff work seven days a week and, in some cases, late into the night. The staff situation is described as very tense in most places, such as Sahlgrenska University Hospital. Peter Brodin is director of laboratory operations.
– It is at the limit of what we can handle now, so try to increase the staff and the number of analysis instruments and also send to external laboratories to reduce the pressure.
Besides the tension The staffing situation in laboratories is also crowded on the premises in many places. They have received help from, among others, 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 personnel with the right skills.
In the Uppsala region, things are going quite well when it comes to test analysis. The reason is that already this summer they made sure to hire a greater number of analysts and to get external laboratories that were ready to alleviate the day when the infection accelerated 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, among other things, clinical microbiology at Uppsala University Hospital.
