Leicester Pathology Service - Annual workload statistics
Coroner's PMs	1,893			Specimens from living patients			2,464,215
Consent' PMs	135			per post mortem:		div. by	2,028
Tissue from living patients	48,101					Equals	1,215
Cervical smears	72,238
Microbiology	430,478
Blood samples from patients	1,913,398
This laboratory serves a population of just under one million.  If these data are extrapolated to the whole of the UK, then NHS laboratories
are processing approximately:	147852900	specimens each year
One full-time job provides:	110400	minutes of working time per year (60 minutes / hr x 40 hrs / week x 46 weeks / year)
If requesting and recording consent takes just 1 minute per specimen, this is equivalent to:						1339	full-time jobs.
						(Equivalent to an average NHS hospital!)
1 minute would actually be insufficient to ask the questions, allow time for thought, listen to the answer, record the answer and transcribe it to a database.
There would be no time to provide information or explanation.  This is therefore a very conservative estimate of the cost.
It would therefore be more efficient to ask each patient once, rather than every time a specimen is taken!
Professor Peter Furness, Leicester General Hospital