Since 2004
Two rooms on the Spintex Road
Everything below happened in the same square mile. The laboratory has grown; the reason it opened has not changed.
Twenty-two years
How the laboratory got here
2004
Two rooms and one analyser
Ben Mensah leaves eleven years of hospital haematology and opens a laboratory in two rented rooms on the Spintex Road, with a second-hand chemistry analyser and a rule about phoning patients.
2009
The microbiology bench
Culture and sensitivity work starts, largely because three neighbourhood clinics kept asking for it and the nearest lab doing it properly was in Korle Bu. Naa Asante joins to run it and has not left.
2013
The first collection points
Four pharmacies in Teshie, Madina, Adenta and Dansoman are trained and equipped to take samples. The van run starts at 11am and 4pm, which is still what it does.
2017
ISO 15189
Accreditation lands after two years of work that mostly consisted of writing down what we already did and then finding the six places we were not doing it consistently.
2020
Testing through the pandemic
The building runs seven days a week for fourteen months. Half the team sleeps in a hotel down the road for the worst eight weeks of it. Nobody who worked here that year has been allowed to forget it.
2021
The PCR suite
Built out of what the pandemic taught us: viral load, HPV genotyping and respiratory panels, run in-house rather than couriered to Johannesburg and back.
2026
Nineteen points, sixty-four people
Three staffed branches, nineteen collection points, and the same rule about phoning patients that the two rooms started with.
Years testing in Accra
22
Tests reported since 2004
480
kCollection points citywide
19
Scientists and phlebotomists
64
What has not changed
A laboratory is a promise that somebody competent looked at your number, and will tell you what it means
Every analyser in this building will be obsolete within a decade. The rule about phoning patients was here before the first one arrived and will outlast the last of them.
Book a test this week
Walk in at Spintex or any of our nineteen collection points, or ask for a home draw and we will come to you. Most results are with you the same evening.
