The 'why' test: Queensland cuts a sick child's wait for answers from a year to two weeks

For a child in hospital with a life-threatening infection or an immune system that attacks their own body, the hardest question is 'why?' At Queensland Children's Hospital, Dr Tatiane Yanes of the University of Queensland and immunologist Dr Peter McNaughton studied nine years of genetic test data from 322 children and built a faster way to answer it: testing done in-house, specialists meeting together instead of families being passed from one to the next, and no more duplicate blood tests — they found 30% of children had been tested twice for no reason. Diagnosis waits that once stretched to 12 months can now be as short as two weeks, and once a diagnosis was made, the treatment plan changed in 90% of cases. The work is published in the Journal of Clinical Immunology.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: institutional program