Clinical analysers are well known in the art, generally being medical laboratory instruments able to analyse a sample, generally a medical sample, to determine one or more characteristics in or for a clinical purpose. One example is an analyser able to measure the properties of bodily fluids such as blood or urine, to assist in diagnosis of a condition or disease of a patient.
Clinical analysers can process a large portion of the samples going into a hospital or private medical laboratory. In the US, such apparatus are regulated under the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 21, in particular Part 862. Section 8622150 defines a continuous flow sequential multiple chemistry analyser for clinical use.
Clinical analysers, with their increasing automation, can provide faster and more accurate and more wide ranging information to a user or operator or to medical personnel, and are being increasingly used in research, hospitals, medical laboratories and similar faculties, often in batch processing environments.
Clinical analysers generally use one or more waters streams, often purified or indeed ultrapurified water, in the analysis and processing, and/or for cleaning of samples and sample holders, etc. The or each resultant water stream or streams, or ‘effluent(s)’, after such use is or are termed the ‘wastewater’. Where there are multiple resultant streams, each stream can be dealt with separately, but are usually combined together to form a single wastewater stream. Due to the use of alkaline solutions such as sodium hydroxide in the analyser processes the wastewater is typically high pH.
With increasing health and safety legislation and increased local regulation, clinical analyser wastewater is increasingly unable to be simply discharged to a drain, but must instead be collected for off-site disposal or treatment, or is increasingly required to be treated on site.
Past clinical analyser wastewater treatment units that were commercially available involved various chemical treatment steps to provide disinfection and neutralisation of the analyser wastewater by the use of harsh chemicals such as strong sodium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid or peracetic acid. Such chemicals are not only harmful in themselves to the environment, but also require particular care in their use and safe disposal.