• Genetic studies have grown by 20% in just one financial year and the Ribera health group laboratory now has a new Genetic Counselling Service.
  • It has implemented and developed the Conventional Microbiology Area and has completed the transformation of its central laboratory, which now serves five of the group’s hospitals and the Vinalopó Health Department.

Ribera Lab, the laboratory division of the Ribera healthcare group, has performed more than half a million referenced tests in 2022, which represents an increase of 12% in its overall activity compared to the previous year.

One of the areas which has grown most exponentially in the last financial year has been Genetics, with a total of 19,000 tests performed, representing a 20% increase over the previous year, coinciding with the launch of the new Genetic Counselling Service, which is headed by a specialist in this area. The group’s central laboratory has created the Ribera Lab Clinical Genetics Unit, “an area with advanced technology which will allow us to offer the best comprehensive care to patients with genetic and rare diseases and to take an integrated approach to clinical diagnosis, guaranteeing faster and more reliable results”, as Mayte Alarcón, Director of Ribera Lab, explains.

In recent years, says Alarcón, “molecular biology has revolutionised the scientific field, allowing the development of Personalised and Precision Medicine, which enables a preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic approach that is appropriate for each patient”.

The past year also saw the implementation and development of the Conventional Microbiology Area, the installation of state-of-the-art automated equipment in its central laboratory in Torrellano (Elche) and the expansion of specific equipment in the other areas of the laboratory “adapting it to the demands and needs of our patients”. In addition, it has carried out “the complete transformation of a laboratory which, until two years ago, only covered reference activity in a routine laboratory, to now take on the activity of our hospitals and, since January of this year, a complete health area such as Vinalopó, in Elche,” explains its Director. In the last two years, Ribera Lab has taken over the laboratory activity of Ribera Hospital de Molina and the hospitals Ribera Polusa, Ribera Juan Cardona, Ribera Povisa and Hospital Universitario del Vinalopó.

But Ribera Lab’s sustained and planned growth has taken a major step forward with the assumption of the laboratory activity of the Vinalopó Health Department, which began on 1 January of this year and which has been prepared throughout the third quarter of last year.

This growth in activity has also led to the expansion of its central laboratory facilities, which has increased tenfold the number of square metres available for carrying out determinations and tests. In this period of time, it has gone from 200 samples per day to 1,500, which in turn has meant a considerable increase in staff, from 40 to 86 professionals, between the central laboratory and the laboratories of the integrated hospitals.

Mayte Alarcón, Director of Ribera Lab, highlights the added value of a laboratory with 20 years’ experience in genetic studies, with highly specialised professionals, and which is now capable of providing comprehensive coverage for a health area such as Vinalopó”.