Link laboratories

This directorate provides the widest spectrum of routine and specialist laboratory services anywhere in Northern Ireland and shares its expertise and services with the Belfast City Hospital.

The main specialty areas are: bacteriology, biochemistry, cytopathology, haematology, immunology, mycology, neuropathology, pathology, regulatory peptides, virology and the children's laboratory.

Many of these laboratories provide formally recognised regional services while others offer unique expertise, even if they are not formally identified as regional laboratory services.

The directorate has unrivalled expertise in its consultant and clinical scientific staff. No other site in Northern Ireland has the range and diversity of laboratory specialisation available for consultation on clinical problems. The laboratories collaborate closely with the Queen's University departments of pathology, microbiology and immunobiology, haematology, medicine and clinical biochemistry in clinically relevant research and development work. This ensures that the directorate keeps in touch with the latest scientific advances relevant to diagnostic testing.

Quality is central to the delivery of service. This is based not simply on routine quality assurance and audit but on national and international comparisons with equivalent major centres of teaching, training and research. All laboratories are full participants in the available National External Quality Assessment Schemes in addition to maintaining rigorous internal quality control on all aspects of their work.