NHLS chief says lab demand is outgrowing the system as hospital building accelerates
Professor Koleka Mlisana says laboratory capacity is now central to clinical decisions and hospital throughput, not a back-office function, as WHX 2026 brings the sector to Johannesburg.
South Africa’s laboratory medicine sector is scaling to meet rising demand for automation, advanced diagnostics and point-of-care testing as hospital networks expand across the public and private sectors, and the head of the country’s public laboratory service says the demand is already running ahead of the system’s historical baselines.
As IOL reported on 29 September, the sector is seeing strong commercial and clinical momentum as hospital infrastructure investment accelerates. The facts of that report are straightforward and check out against the sources it names.
“Demand for laboratory services in South Africa is outpacing historical baselines, driven by hospital network expansion, chronic disease burden and the need for faster, more accurate turnaround times,” Professor Koleka Mlisana, chief executive of the National Health Laboratory Service, said in that report. “Laboratory capacity is no longer a back-office function. It is central to clinical decision-making, patient flow and hospital throughput.”
For a South African reader, the institution behind that quotation is the part worth understanding. The NHLS is the state-owned laboratory network that runs diagnostic testing for the public health system. It is the service that processes the bloods, swabs and specimens for the majority of South Africans who rely on public hospitals and clinics. When the NHLS says capacity is under strain, the people who feel it first are patients waiting on a result before a doctor can decide on treatment.
The commercial picture comes with numbers. A 2025 GlobalData/MarketLine industry profile cited in the report values the South African healthcare providers market at US$40.3 million in 2024, with 4.6% compound annual growth over 2019 to 2024 and a projected 3.8% growth to US$48.7 million by 2029. Those are the figures the sector is using to argue that investment in laboratory and diagnostic infrastructure is a multi-year cycle rather than a one-off spend.
Tom Coleman, portfolio director for healthcare at inD, the organiser of the World Health Expo, put the supplier view plainly in the same report. “The market signals are clear. Investment is flowing into laboratory and diagnostics infrastructure because it delivers proven clinical and operational value,” he said.
The sector’s next gathering is local. WHX 2026 runs at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Johannesburg from 6 to 8 October, with a dedicated Laboratory Zone for automation, diagnostics and point-of-care suppliers, and a Lab Leadership Indaba partnered with the NHLS. The organisers expect more than 10,000 attendees and 600 exhibitors from over 60 countries.
What a South African reader will notice over the coming years is less the exhibition floor and more the turnaround time on a test result. Laboratory automation and point-of-care testing, which moves some tests closer to the patient rather than sending every sample to a central lab, are the two technologies the sector is betting on to shorten that wait. Whether the investment reaches the public network at the scale the NHLS describes is the question that will decide whether the demand Professor Mlisana describes is met or merely managed.
Source: IOL, South Africa’s laboratory medicine sector scales following hospital infrastructure investment
