Ben Franklin said: “Critics are our friends, they show us our faults“.  A true statement.  When a reporter from Wisconsin wrote a story about newborn screening turn-around times around the country, we found out that we had room for improvement when it comes to the time it takes newborn metabolic screening samples to get from AZ hospitals to our Lab.  Basically, it was taking too long for the samples to be screened for life threatening issues… so I set a goal of getting 95% of the samples to our Lab within 3 days by July 1, 2014.

I’m happy to say that we met our goal a month early.  During May there were 6,948 babies were born in Arizona. More than 96% of newborn bloodspot specimens got to our Arizona State Laboratory within 3 days.  In the last 6 months we’ve achieved a 30% increase in the number of specimens that got to our Lab within 3 days.

The Newborn Screening Transit Time Project team did a fabulous job tackling training for hospitals, eliminating issues with delivery contractors and ensuring that everyone involved is on the same page. Thanks to Celia Nabor for her excellent leadership and the whole team’s work to achieve the goal one month earlier than asked.  Well done team.