Lighthouse Labs - Innovating in a Crisis

The Scottish Government’s need to rapidly scale up its COVID testing capacity led to the establishment of the Lighthouse Laboratory - now one of the largest COVID diagnostic testing facilities in the United Kingdom.

Stakeholders identified a research laboratory at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland as a site that could be repurposed as a COVID testing facility. In order for the lab to achieve scale in a short space of time, the team opted for agile project management approaches. The team also adopted lean principles to implement process improvements and used the theory of constraints to manage bottlenecks.

The Lighthouse Laboratory processed 41 tests on the first day. Currently, it is capable of processing 85,000 COVID tests within a 24-hour turnaround time.