Canberra Hospital specimens lab staff showing the Tempus 600 to Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith. Photo: James Coleman.
The ACT Government is promising faster treatment and shorter wait times at Canberra Hospital’s emergency department thanks to the installation of some new “Australia-first” tech.
The Tempus 600 is said to cut by half the time it takes for blood and urine samples to reach the hospital’s pathology lab for testing.
Rather than emergency staff literally having to walk a sample over to the lab, they can simply place it in the tray of one of three sending machines in the department and it’s whisked away in pipes – much like in a pneumatic tube – to the lab.
Unlike a pneumatic tube, however, there’s no manual handling involved at the other end.
The samples are placed by robots onto small ‘cars’ and raced around something that looks a lot like a Scalextric track directly to the clinician’s desk.
Robots also scan each of the samples and automatically upload the information into the Digital Health Record (DHR), removing another task a person would have to take time to do.
The ACT Government says this means the tech is not only faster, but there’s less room for accidental error.
“Most clinical sample delivery systems require multiple steps to prepare and send a sample, which can create a bottleneck at certain points in the process of sending a sample to the laboratory,” Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said.
“The new Tempus system is one-touch technology – put the clinical sample in the Tempus machine, and the system does the rest.
“This means less manual handling, which means less likelihood of a human error being introduced into the process when patient samples are being moved from one place to another, less points where a sample might get lost, or something put in an incorrect place.
“Now that’s not very likely to happen but with the Tempus 600, that risk is eliminated.”
Samples on track. Photo: James Coleman.
Samples travel at about 600 metres per minute (36 km/h) in the tubes, so the whole journey is done within 40 seconds.
“This new technology means samples can be analysed sooner, which leads to faster patient diagnosis, earlier treatment, and a shorter stay in hospital,” Ms Stephen-Smith said.
Emergency Department clinical director Dr Sam Scanlan said the benefits extend right across the health system.
“It means we’re seeing turnaround time – so from when we’re putting the sample in the machine to getting a result on the digital health record – of around 20 minutes, from previously around 50 minutes,” he said.
“This means we’re seeing about 250 to 300 samples a day going through this system for about 80 to 100 patients, so we’re saving about half an hour per patient.
“That’s giving us about 50 hours of efficiency gain in the department every day, which helps with trying to reduce the wasted wait time for patients, meaning that we’re more efficient right across the system.
“From a safety perspective, it means if there’s an unexpected result that’s quite abnormal, we’re getting that result 30 minutes earlier, which is fantastic for patient safety.”
Dr Sam Scanlan talking to Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith. Photo: James Coleman.
More urgent samples can also be placed in a separate tray and sent immediately using an “express mode function”.
“We do have a system whereby if there are a number of samples in the system to be sent, we can bypass that … there’s a little exciting button we can press and put the samples in and off they shoot before the other ones,” Dr Scanlan said.
Data from the past financial year shows the average time patients spent being treated at the ACT’s emergency departments has improved – to the point we recorded the shortest ED stays in the country.
A map of the machine. Photo: James Coleman.
In a December report issued by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the majority of patients treated at ACT emergency departments in 2023-24 were either admitted or able to go home within eight hours and six minutes – down from nine hours and 49 minutes on the previous year.
But the figures are still short of targets set by Canberra Health Services (CHS).
The agency’s latest annual report shows it wants to treat 100 per cent of category-one patients (those with a life-threatening condition) within the clinically recommended time frame, but failed in one per cent of cases.
Category three, or ‘urgent’, patients are meant to be seen within 30 minutes, but that was only achieved for 51 per cent of cases despite a 75 per cent target.
Most patients treated at ACT emergency departments in 2023-24 were either admitted or able to go home within eight hours and six minutes. Photo: James Coleman.
Overall, 62 per cent of ACT emergency patients were seen on time, ranking the ACT fourth behind NSW, Victoria and Queensland and below the national average of 67 per cent.
Ms Stephen-Smith is confident of better results this financial year, in large part thanks to the new tube system.
“Turning around pathology results quickly is an important part of that, and the Tempus 600 implementation just helps make it that little bit quicker and little bit more reliable for our clinicians.”
