Author: Kayleigh Roberts, Product Manager, Alpha Laboratories Ltd.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global healthcare landscape had to undergo a swift transformation. Traditional face-to-face healthcare delivery was significantly disrupted, and accommodations had to be made to ensure that patients could be triaged and monitored in ways that protected public health and also enabled timely and accurate diagnosis or treatment of disease without the need for repeated clinic or hospital visits.
The increased use of telephone or video appointments allowed patients to maintain continued contact with their healthcare providers. However, even after the worst of the crisis had passed, budgets, staffing, and resources within the healthcare landscape still required alleviation from the immense pressures of the pandemic, and answers were still needed on how biological samples could be obtained in a safe, quick, and accurate way. Enter: at-home patient testing.
In 2017, Scotland became the first country within the UK to overhaul its bowel screening programme and introduce a new quantitative Faecal Immunochemical Test (FIT) in place of the guaiac-based cards. With this came the implementation of new patient packs which provided all of the instructions and tools necessary for patients to collect their faecal samples quickly and hygienically, and return them to the laboratory for automated processing. It was off the back of this initiative that home testing started to become a viable option on a wider scale, and through the pandemic, new bespoke kits were created in the same way to ensure that symptomatic patients could also be supplied.
Today, the bowel screening programmes across the UK are some of the most successful examples of at-home sample collection, with the combined programmes sending out approximately nine million screening invitations per year. The average return rates across all programmes range between 60-70%,1, 2, 3, 4 so although there are still opportunities for improvement, the overall uptake can still be considered successful for triaging the wider population and sending referrals for appropriate further investigation.
