Rural nurses want their own testing machines, in order to weather extreme storms

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2026-01-23 10:48

New Zealand

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Extreme weather can hamstring rural health testing services, either by cutting off access completely, or by forcing doctors to rely on choppers and planes to get patient samples out to the lab. One option explored by a new research paper is 'point-of-care testing', where the rural health provider can process their patients' samples, like HPV tests for cervical cancer, on-site rather than sending it to a lab. The rural nurses and doctor interviewed said that having the ability to process the tests themselves after Cyclone Gabrielle meant there was "no rigmarole, there’s just no muck around". The researchers suggest the the national health system can future-proof rural areas by supporting these innovative technologies.

Journal/
conference: Journal of Primary Health Care

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Victoria University of Wellington, University of Auckland, University of Otago, The University of Melbourne

Funder: This project was funded by the Health Research Council (HRC) of New Zealand (20/550). Conflicts of interest. M. S. and D. H. are investigators on the Compass trial for which their organisation, The Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer (ACPCC), has received kits and partial funding from Roche. ACPCC has received funding for commercial validation projects from Abbott, AusDiagnostics, Cepheid, Copan, Roche, Seegene, Teal Health, and V-Veil. ACPCC has also received equipment or supplies from Abbott, AusDiagnostics, BD, Cepheid, Copan, Hologic, MicroBix, NRL, Qiagen, Rovers, Roche, and Seegene for research purposes. The remaining authors do not have any conflicts of interest. Neither HRC nor Cepheid were involved in the development, implementation, analysis, or write-up of this project.

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