The people at the benches
Sixty-four people, and the ones who sign your result
A laboratory is only as good as whoever looked at the number last. These are the people who do that here.
Book a test
Dr. Ben Mensah
Founder and chief biomedical scientist
Trained at Korle Bu and spent eleven years in hospital haematology before opening a two-room lab on the Spintex Road in 2004. Still signs off every abnormal result personally.
Dr. Adjoa Kwarteng
Head of clinical chemistry
Runs the chemistry bench and the quality programme. She is the reason every assay here is calibrated against a second control before a single patient sample touches it.
Naa Asante
Head of microbiology
Culture, sensitivity and the unglamorous work of telling a clinic which antibiotic will actually clear an infection. Fourteen years at this bench and counting.
Kwabena Darko
Senior haematologist
Blood films, counts and the sickle cell programme we run with three schools in Teshie. Teaches the second-year students who rotate through every March.
Selorm Adjei
Molecular diagnostics lead
Built the PCR suite in 2021 and keeps it running. If a result depends on a machine behaving, she has already checked the machine twice.
Yaw Boateng
Lead phlebotomist
Has taken more samples than anyone in the building and trains everybody who joins. If you have ever left here without a bruise, that is his doing.
How we keep standards
Competence is a schedule, not a certificate
Everybody here is registered
Every scientist on the benches holds current registration with the Allied Health Professions Council, and we pay for the renewals. A lapsed registration is a lapsed licence, and there is no version of this work where that is somebody else's problem.
Phlebotomists are reassessed twice a year
Not a refresher talk — an observed draw, marked against the same checklist we use for new starters. Most results that come back wrong were collected wrong, and the draw is the only part of the process a patient actually experiences.
We train the next ones
Four second-year biomedical science students rotate through every March and September. It slows the benches down for a fortnight. It is also the only reason there is anybody to hire in five years.
Years testing in Accra
22
Tests reported since 2004
480
kCollection points citywide
19
Scientists and phlebotomists
64
I had been sent for the same test three times by three different places and got three different answers. Assay ran it once, called me the same evening to explain what the number meant, and sent the report to my doctor before I got home.
Efua Sackey
Patient, Tema
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.
