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Scotland chooses VITEK® 2 for all NHS Microbiology Laboratories 
Scotland chooses VITEK® 2 for all NHS Microbiology Laboratories
19 March, 2007National Procurement, a division of NHS National Services Scotland and the Scottish Microbiology Forum have awarded bioMérieux with a major contract to supply each of the 27 NHS (National Health Service) clinical microbiology laboratories in the country with a VITEK 2 system for standardising antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) and bacterial identification.
The decision to standardise antibiotic susceptibility testing and bacterial identification is in line with the government’s goal to provide better health for everyone in Scotland following the initiatives set out by the Scottish Executive in an important document entitled “Improving Health in Scotland - The Challenge”. With reference to antibiotic prescribing, the objective is to provide timely and high quality surveillance data about existing and emerging bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
The Scottish Microbiology Forum and National Procurement chose VITEK 2 after a thorough tender process of over 9 months, where a number of criteria e. g. price, after sales service & maintenance, health and safety and delivery were used to compare the merits of three automated systems available today. The duration of the contract is for 7 years.
According to an official representative, the Scottish Microbiology Forum is extremely pleased to be associated with bioMérieux in this exciting project to provide standardised, automated AST to the whole of Scotland. This offers major benefits to patients, clinicians, microbiologists and epidemiologists in the ongoing battle with antibiotic resistance.
"This is a major success for bioMérieux. It demonstrates once again the strengths of VITEK 2 technology and our worldwide leadership in the field of automated microbiology. This also proves the calibre of our commercial teams" said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of bioMérieux.
VITEK 2 and its expert software Advanced Expert System, AES™, offer significant benefits for the microbiologist, the clinician and, ultimately, the patient. In addition to optimised result reliability, the microbiologist can be confident that even weakly expressed resistance mechanisms will be detected. The microbiologist will obtain a rapid, accurate and validated test report, and can send it more rapidly to the clinician. This report helps the clinician to make the correct diagnosis and, when necessary, adapt the antibiotic therapy at the earliest possible stage. The patient benefits from timely treatment with the most relevant antibiotics.
VITEK 2 also contributes to the detection of nosocomial infections, enabling proactive measures to be implemented.