Washington

The Washington newborn screening (NBS) laboratory operated on Saturdays but was limited to reading Friday’s results and setting up repeat testing for urgent results. Starting in April 2016, Washington NBS moved to a more robust weekend workload and now screens for all disorders except hemoglobins and SCID. In 2014, the Washington state legislature passed a law requiring all specimens be delivered to the NBS lab within 72 hours of collection. With this new law, birthing facilities started using more reliable courier services that delivered specimens on Saturdays and thus providing a need for a faster turnaround time. Before, the Washington laboratory information system only recorded date of testing, but soon recognized the need to add in a data field for time of receipt. By differentiating between the date of receipt and date of testing, the Washington NBS program was able to show that there was a huge time deficiency of specimens arriving on Friday and not being tested until Monday. With this evidence, the lab was able to hire two analysts to be able to expand weekend operations to nearly full testing on Saturday and respond to urgent results on Sunday.

Now on Saturdays, Washington NBS staffs one lead analyst and three lab technicians. Since this is a skeleton crew, an on-call system for an additional lead and analyst was implemented to provide backup in case of last-minute absences. The staff on-call receives a $25 flat rate and, if called in, they receive comp time off to be used at a future date. The additional Sunday shift (approximately 2 hours of work) is rotated among the other three Monday-Friday lead analysts for reviewing Saturday results and reporting any urgent findings to follow-up.