It is always good to see companies promoting health before their bottom line. Africa and other developing countries can’t afford Western prices for vital drugs to combat HIV and other illnesses.

For more information about Roche and HIV you can try this link

or type in this address:

http://www.roche-hiv.com

As a whole day, I don’t think there is much room for improvement. The day covered technical and medical aspects of heart disease. The venue was very good and situated in a very accessible location.

If the chance arises for you to take part in one of these sessions, I would recommend it.

The material is well presented but there isn’t much of it. The Vitros 950 is summed up in five pages which are basically powerpoint slides. For a trainee this could be a very good primer but may still leave them wanting a bit more technical detail. This detail is available via “hidden” slides. Numerous slides contain links for more detailed information but these slides are hidden from the outline and there seems to be no way of downloading the content for off-line browsing.

Though this content is available on the American site, it seems to be lacking from the UK site (It may be lurking on the site, it just isn’t in an obvious place). It is possible to obtain reagent kit inserts via a search function.

Compared to some of the other companies, especially Abbott, the material is sparse to say the least. Though it is accessible to anyone, you don’t have to register and login to get some simple details about the underlying technology.

I would like to see the UK site take more of a cue from the American site but to correct the spellings! I don’t think it paints a company in a good light when simple spelling mistakes are repeated. If that if the effort they put into their site, what effort do they put into supporting their customers (I know it is a bit rich for me to pick up on someone elses spelling bu then I’m not a multi-national company employing thousands of people!).

The main site is http://www.orthoclinical.com/ which then asks for your location. Fair enough. So I then go the UK link, noticing that quite a few countries don’t have native language sites e.g. Greece, Denmark, Scandinavia. When I arrive at the destination of the UK link, I see a little flag waving in the corner to reinforce the fact that I have reached the UK site.

So I go to look at what appears to be their big product the Vitros 5,1. I know I am being REALLY picky here, but shouldn’t that be 5.1? Maybe the 5,1 section will inform me of why it is 5,1 and not 5.1.

When I reach the 5,1 section, I am confronted with a large animated gif extolling the virtues of the machine. It does allow the site to produce some flash-like graphics without the requirement of having flash installed. BUT. Yes, you knew it was coming. I have selected the UK site, a fact reinforced by the flag waving but still I am confronted with american spellings. This kind of thing is fine if I am using an american site, because thats how they spell! If I have selected the UK version, I do expect the site to have more than token localisation. Having an address in the UK does not count as localisation in opinion.

I will post some more about the training content later

Knowing Roche is a rather large company with numerous divisions, I headed straight for the diagnostics division which can be found here. I did like the approach of the site asking whether you are a patient etc to direct you to the appropriate site/subsection. I find this a far better navigation tool for a site for general public access as it leaves little room for misunderstaning.

That said, I am a little disappointed that clicking on the “I’m a Hospital Lab Professional” link takes me to a page with a link to another page, the Cobas site. If you want to go to the Cobas site, why not link directly?

Having had a look around for some chemistry info, I did find a section on their equipment (here) but regretably the site is American. It is a shame the uk site couldn’t mirror the information. After searching for a while, I couldn’t find any method information unlike some of the other companies in the same field.

P.S. The person on this site does remind me of Ugly Betty

http://www.waters.com/

http://www.pathologyinpractice.com/
http://www.mlwmagazine.com/

A colleague recently went on a training course sponsored by Abbot. It was for trainees and grade 1′s and covered a wide variety of information. In the process, she was told about this site:

http://www.abbottdiagnostics.co.uk/Science/

I will look into this a bit more and report back.

http://diagnostics.siemens.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreCatalogDisplay~q_catalogId~e_-111~a_langId~e_-111~a_storeId~e_10001.htm (You may need to paste this link together)

I think the site needs a bit of a tidy, as it seems to take a far clicks to find things that could be accessible slightly quicker. Take for example TSH analysis on the Immulite, you click on products, then click on Immulite.  It now goes the options of several different links, two of which might lead us to the technical information about TSH.  Assay menu is just a list of tests, no links provided for their package inserts. If you choose Package Inserts, you then have to select the analyser again!

I think the major problem of this site is that it is the combination of two companies products i.e. Bayer and DPC.  It may take require some time and effort on the part of Siemens to smooth out the rough edges.