Nikos Panagiotou recently joined Sonic Healthcare UK to oversee the setup of a new diagnostic laboratory for the Cleveland Clinic.
Sonic Healthcare UK has recently opened a brand new laboratory to provide pathology services for the Cleveland Clinic’s new London-based hospital. Nikos Panagiotou is Head of Department, and since joining the organisation in August 2021, has managed a team that has essentially built up the lab from scratch,
in time for the hospital’s opening on 29th March this year.
Nikos has been in medical diagnostics since 2003, working in the NHS and in various private laboratories. He initially specialised in haematology and blood transfusion, but for the past ten years has been working across multiple different areas.
His academic interests, however, have been more focused on leadership in healthcare, which over the past eight years has provided the basis for his postgraduate studies and, ultimately, his doctorate.
“The source of this interest stems from personal experiences I have had, where I witnessed certain systemic failures at work. I was always wondering what was going wrong and realised that sometimes things go wrong at the top, and it cascades down and affects all sorts of levels of practice.”
His studies then set him up well for his new role at Sonic Healthcare UK:
“My postgraduate and doctoral studies in leadership have helped me gain knowledge and skills that I can apply in my current role, and it has certainly helped me see my area of practice in a new light.”
That’s not to say it hasn’t been a novel experience:
“It’s exciting because although I had been personally involved in restructuring laboratories in the past and opening new departments, I have never been involved in actually setting up a new laboratory from scratch. For me personally, that was a great challenge.”
A challenge indeed: there were, of course, issues that fell outside of the team’s control, an inevitability when setting up an entirely new laboratory from scratch. The planning process must also have involved a lot of unknowns: it was a building site when Nikos first took on the project, and the team were only allowed onto the site in November.
Teamwork, Nikos stresses, was key to overcoming these challenges, and he is proud of the team’s achievements:
“Working as a team closely and in an organised way meant that we had the lab ready in time for opening day, which was a huge team achievement. I’m very grateful to the team from the Halo and other sites that supported me. It’s constantly been a case of teamwork and I’m really proud of being a member of that team.”
Since the laboratory opened along with the hospital, it has been providing diagnostic services for patients on a 24/7 basis, both for those in the hospital and at the outpatients clinic in Portland Place. So far, they are offering haematology, blood transfusion, biochemistry, molecular testing, and are soon to offer MRSA screenings as well. The laboratory is situated on site at the Cleveland Clinic, and any specialist tests that they can’t perform in-house are sent to the Halo.
They have the capacity to increase the repertoire of tests should the Cleveland Clinic require it:
“I’m looking at opportunities for further development - there’s lots of scope for the department to grow in the future.”
It’s an exciting time for this laboratory, and we look forward to seeing it continue to grow.