Profile

The Medical Biochemistry and Immunology Department provides a wide range of clinical biochemistry, toxicology and immunology services from its laboratories at the University Hospital of Wales, University Hospital Llandough and Velindre Hospital.

The department currently handles in excess of 2500 samples each day, produces over 5 million analytical results each year and is fully accredited by Clinical Pathology UK Ltd.

The Department provides a service to primary and secondary care in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan as well as supporting tertiary clinical services in Cardiff. These specialist laboratory services, including Supra Regional Assay services, are provided to other laboratories across Wales and the UK. These include peptide and steroid hormones, porphyrins and special immunology tests.
Other national services include Downs and Neonatal Screening for Wales, regional trace metal and paediatric metabolic services.
You can see the website here: http://www.cardiffandvaleuhb.wales.nhs.uk/medical-biochemistry-immunology

Every day has the potential to be very different in my job, depending when and where I am working.  I work shifts so sometimes have to stay up all night from 7.30pm to 8am running urgent samples on patients who are very ill.  If I am working a ‘normal’ day I start at 8.45am and finish at 5.15pm. First thing in the morning I set up the analysers (machines) that I will be using and check that they are working properly.  Then the samples are loaded on and then I check all the results and phone the doctors to tell them about any really abnormal results which they need to deal with or else the patient might die.

Sometimes I have to visit the intensive care, maternity wards, theatres and casualty to look after their blood gas analysers which measure how much oxygen and carbon dioxide is in a patient’s blood and also what pH it is.

I have also performed ‘sweat tests’ on babies in Children’s Outpatients to diagnose Cystic Fibrosis.