Microbiology

Our Department of Clinical Microbiology provides comprehensive medical microbiology services (including virology) for the whole Nottingham health community. With just over 100 staff, including consultants, junior medical staff, biomedical scientists, clinical scientists, laboratory assistants and administrative staff, the laboratory handles in excess of 900,000 microbiology and virology samples per year.

The department processes a range of specimens from patients including urine samples, swabs, sputum, stool and blood samples in order to diagnose infections such as urinary tract infections, pneumonia, skin and soft tissue infections and viral infections such as hepatitis and HIV. The department is also active in supporting infection prevention and control activities by providing the laboratory diagnostics for MRSA and C.difficile. As well as diagnosing infections in individual patients, the laboratory monitors patterns of infection over time and the rates of antibiotic resistance amongst pathogens such as E.coli.

The laboratory is a UKAS accredited medical laboratory, No.8755. Teaching, training, audit, research and development are all actively pursued within the department

Please note information is uncontrolled when printed.

 

Microbiology User Survey

Please click below link for completing the Microbiology User Survey.

https://pmed.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/nuh-microbiology-user-survey-2022-2

 

Opening times

From the 6th December 2021 The Microbiology Laboratory will have on site cover 24 hours a day. However, there will be very limited staffing providing essential work between 17:00 and 09:00. 

NUH Staff Intranet: http://nuhnet/diagnostics_clinical_support/pathology/microbiology/Pages/home.aspx

 

Urgent samples

Requests for urgent samples between 5pm and 9am must be made via switchboard asking for the Microbiology Biomedical Scientist (BMS).

 

Out of hours medical advice

The Medical Microbiologists are in the Department 7 days a week between 09:00 and 17:00. Outside these times an on-call service will be provided.

The on-call Medical Microbiologist (Registrar or Consultant) is on call from home and covers both the City and QMC campuses. They can be contacted via the hospital switchboard for urgent clinical advice, advice about urgent infection control issues and to discuss needle stick injuries from high risk patients. They do not have access to results.

 

Location

The Department is located on A & B floor ,West block,Queens Medical Centre ,Nottingham,NG7 2UH.

Important information

Urgent samples should be phoned through to the laboratory wherever possible. If this is not feasible, please indicate that the sample is urgent by writing it on the patient request form.