Canadian Hospital Specialties and Roche Diagnostics partner to increase critical swab inventory in Ontario

Roche Diagnostics, a market leader in diagnostics testing solutions, manufactures a dual swab kit that works with COVID-19 tests. Due to concerns about sterility once the dual swab kit was opened, testing facilities were required to use only one portion of the two-swab kit per person, discarding the unused swab.

Canadian Hospital Specialties (CHS), a medical device manufacturer and distributor in Oakville, had the capacity to repurpose and separate the Roche Diagnostics kits quickly and the two companies worked together in collaboration with Ontario Health to increase the critical swab inventory available in Ontario.

What’s more, this created jobs. To ramp up production and make this happen, CHS had their 240 employees running full time and hired an additional 27 employees, while staggering start times and leveraging robust employee health screening to protect their safety.