Opening Of Hammersmith clinic furthers revolution in sexual health diagnostics
Hammersmith Broadway is next in series of clinics to offer fast and discrete testing
Cepheid has announced the opening of the 10 Hammersmith Broadway Sexual Health Clinic in London.
The Hammersmith Clinic is the latest in a series of new clinics developed by the Chelsea & Westminster NHS Foundation Trust.
This is the same team behind the Dean Street Express, a highly-acclaimed sexual health clinic located in London's Soho district that has been challenging the model for sexually-transmitted infection (STI) testing and public health since it opened its doors in February 2014.10 Hammersmith Broadway and Dean Street Express offer drop-in service and high throughput testing on site for a number of STIs, including CT/NG, HIV, and syphilis.
Like Dean Street Express, the 10 Hammersmith Broadway clinic uses Cepheid's GeneXpert System, the world's-most-popular molecular diagnostics instrument.
Testing with the GeneXpert Infinity system is completed entirely on site, significantly reducing the time to diagnosis, and delivering accurate results that can be shared with patients in hours, rather than days to weeks. This process minimises time and worry for patients, reduces transmission risk, and enables more-immediate treatment.
The 10 Hammersmith Broadway clinic is the new home for the West London Centre for Sexual Health and provides Londoners with even greater accessibility to high-quality sexual health diagnostics. These clinics, empowered by the rapid test capability of the GeneXpert System, will provide broad access to patients throughout the city.
The Dean Street Express clinic alone has screened over 200,000 patients in the past two years, and last week received a Service Excellence Award from Cepheid.
"The innovative, patient-focused clinics Dean Street Express and 10 Hammersmith Broadway deliver actionable information in a way that is transformative for patients at risk for STIs," said David Persing, Cepheid's chief medical and technology officer.
"Patients appreciate getting their negative results back quickly, and the clinicians are happy with the short time to positive results because they can often avoid empiric therapy. Healthcare professionals know that if they treat early and effectively, they can reduce or even prevent complications of STIs and intercept subsequent transmission events."
The 10 Hammersmith Broadway and Dean Street Express clinics offer customer-friendly and discrete sexual health testing that is highly effective in screening for STIs and can result in a higher rate of case detection in both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients. Further clinic developments are scheduled for later this year.