TUCKED away in a section of Inverell Hospital lies the Inverell pathology laboratory.Usually hidden in a musty area filled with agar dishes, beakers and test tubes, it threw its doors open on Wednesday for World Pathology Day.
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Wendy Arentz, senior scientist, first entered the lab during work experience in 1980 and it was love at first sight.
She points out that Inverell has nothing to envy from city areas.
“We are connected with well-established IT systems for 19 years. There’s a standardisation of equipment across similar labs around the state, and if we don’t have something we can send it off and get back the result immediately,” she said.
If anything, she points out to the positives of country pathology units that are not as structured so that a pathologist does the job of collector. “We get to see real people and not just lab numbers and this value adds to the service,” she said.
“We want people to support public pathology,” Arentz said, stressing the speed, accuracy and immediate availability of results to public hospitals.
The NATA-accredited unit does 75 per cent of its work with outpatients and visits Ashford every two weeks. It sees people from around the local area to as far as the Queensland border. In fact, 22,000 of the 60 million blood tests conducted per annum in NSW are covered by this local unit.
Call 67219529 for more informaiton.
