HUNTER residents who have waited as long as six days for COVID test results are finding it quicker to get a second test at a new Newcastle clinic.
A drive-through COVID testing clinic at Honeysuckle promising "same day results" is now also offering a walk-up service and is prioritising people - particularly children - with special needs.
The strategic operations director of Histopath - which has opened the Honeysuckle site as well as clinics at Maitland, Dungog, and the Lakeside Leisure Centre at Raymond Terrace - said they had responded to Hunter New England Health's plea to the State Health Emergency Operations Centre (SHEOC) last week.
"There was a wave of infections in the area," Greg Granger said. "And we had the capacity to come up here to establish some high through-put mass-capacity sites to enable greater testing capacity for the region.
"We had three locked in within two days.
"Honeysuckle was the priority, but that was the harder one to get through council, and through all of the road management and safety checks because of its location. So it was the last one to open.
"With the other ones we were quickly able to get the structures and infrastructures and resources in place to get boots on the ground."
Mr Granger said most people who are tested in the morning at the sites will receive results by the afternoon or early evening.
"We have couriers just going up and down the highway for multiple pick-ups throughout the day," he said. "Those that have their collection in the late afternoon should get their results overnight, or very early in the morning.
"We are not taking on new projects unless we know we have the capacity to get those results to people, so they can get out of isolation and get back to work or whatever they need to do."
Hunter residents who had waited more than four days for test results via other privately run testing facilities have said they were re-tested at the new site out of frustration - and received those results first.
"We have built-in walking stations at all of the sites now - particularly at Honeysuckle, where we have found the biggest freeway through the city is that walking path along the harbour," Mr Granger said. "We accept walk-ins at all of our clinics up here.
"We also have a special service for people with children with disabilities. If they notify us when they arrive, we can give them VIP treatment straight to the front and we'll have special nurses attend to those people. We don't want them having to wait."
Mr Granger said as well as expanding their lab testing capacity, they had been developing their data collection technologies, which used QR codes, to compile patient's demographic details.
"That is probably the biggest bottleneck, managing all that data," he said.
"People fill it all out on their phones, but we have workarounds for people who don't have a modern phone too."
The clinics are open from 8am to 6pm daily, but Dungog is open until 5pm.
