Point of Care Patient Testing (POCT) – ONPS 2425/6
Assignment  –  Introduction of a new POCT device

Scenario:
In order to improve patient access and throughput, a management review of the requirements for a rural (outreach) diabetes treatment clinic has established the need to provide POCT for glucose and HbA1c.  You have been asked by your manager to provide recommendations for the selection of appropriate POCT devices for these two tests.

Your Assignment:
Provide justification for your choice of glucose and HbA1c devices.  To do this you will need to develop a selection criteria to compare the available devices.  Then you will need to summarise your recommendations and consider any on-going operational procedures required in order to provide quality results for patient testing.

Include in your answer recommendations with regard to:
•    Critical evaluation of testing devices which provide results appropriate to clinical requirements (i.e. is the chosen device fit for purpose ?)
•    Pre-analytical considerations
o    Instructions for patient preparation and sample collection
o    Patient safety and risk management
o    Operator handling & training required
•    Analytical considerations
o    Frequency and type of quality control (QC)
o    External quality assessment (EQA) procedures
o    Device maintenance requirements
•    Post-analytical
o    Instructions for the recording / reporting of results
•    Other general considerations for testing

Some background notes about this assignment:
For the successful completion of this exercise, you will need to think about all the aspects of testing for these analytes.  This will include all of the quality specifications as well as the practical considerations such as user friendliness, cost, shelf-life of reagents, portability and so forth.  (Note: This is what you would need to do in a work environment if you were asked to select a new instrument – be it lab or POCT).  To do this you would first collate the data and include it in a spreadsheet for comparison.  Then once your comparison and decision is made, you would write a brief report for your manager.  Such a report is called an executive summary.  These summaries are only one page in length – this is because your manager is busy and just wants your conclusions with brief justifications.

Structure:
Your details: Your executive summaryand Excel sheet must have your name, student number, & date as a footer to the document.

Justification = Excel spread sheet:  Develop two spreadsheets (one for each analyte) to be presented in the one workbook(plus embeIDed as tables in the word document).  Each of these spreadsheets should critically compare devices against your selection criteria.

Recommendations = Written (executive) summary:  Provide a written summary justifying your recommendations.  As this is an executive summary, your word document should be no more than two page of writing with a word limit of 500 for the written text.

Referencing: Vancouver style.  Place your relevant references at the bottom of your Excel sheet and just aID the main references based on your decision to the word document.

Submission
For this assignment, you need to do the following:
1) Embed you two worksheets as pages in the executive summary word file and upload this entire word document to the Turnitin link.
2) Upload your original Excel file to the submission link – I will look at this file for your embeIDed calculations etc.
3) Ensure your name is part of the submission file name.

Due Date
5pm Friday of week 10 of the semester.

Marks
20% of course (10% written summary and 10% for the spreadsheets).  Note your executive summary will be marked in relation to your Excel sheet.  No marks will be awarded for an executive summary in the absence of an Excel sheet with the justification.