A meeting with Lord Bethell
How the meeting came about
In April this year the IBMS wrote to the Secretary of State, Matt Hancock - offering to support the government’s attempt to scale up the COVID-19 testing process. Shortly before my appearance at the All Party Parliamentary Group committee meeting on 5th October, the IBMS received a response to the letter sent from the office of Lord Bethell the health minister who is responsible for testing supplies. Unfortunately, it was apparent that the government had mistaken the IBMS for a private company.
As part of the IBMS’s campaign to raise the profile of the profession, in October I gave an interview to The Sunday Post in which I mentioned our offer had not been taken up. Lord Scriven, on reading the article, raised the issue in the House of Lords asking Lord Bethell to meet with the IBMS. After agreeing to the meeting, Lord Scriven put us both in touch to arrange, giving us a more direct opportunity to offer our support and advice and raise the concerns of our members.
At the meeting
The Zoom meeting took place on Wednesday 11th November. In attendance for the IBMS were National Council Member Debra Padgett who has a microbiology background, Chief Executive Jill Rodney, and myself as President. Accompanying Lord Bethell were Dame Anna Dominiczak who is the lead for the lighthouse labs and David Wells, who was representing NHS England and Improvement.
Our discussion began by focussing on training and workforce issues. We discussed new tests that were coming to market (such as lateral flow devices and LAMP), the laboratory technology required to run them and the potential impact they would have on staff and services. We also pushed for the development of an integrated strategic resourcing plan to work together to train the workforce that would be required to work with this new technology – outlining that a lack of coordination could destabilise parts of the service as we are all ‘fishing in the same pond’.
We raised the risk of running multiple COVID-19 testing platforms in many laboratories and adding more platforms will put further pressure on staff and space in already crowded laboratory environments. We also talked about how the IBMS could help standardise and deliver training for staff on the new platforms through our links with universities and laboratories – highlighting our work with NHS London region in fast tracking the training of staff to create a sustainable workforce, fit for purpose. The current training needs centred around training support staff as we all recognised that increasing the number of experienced biomedical scientists is a medium to long term ambition.
Raising our members concerns
We talked about how our members and the profession were close to exhaustion - working extreme hours to try and deliver 24-hour testing. We discussed how laboratory staff across all disciplines were collaborating very closely to ensure that they can maximise capacity across the board.
Also, we raised the issues that our company members are facing with manufacturing test kits, emphasising the relatively low baseline of the diagnostics industry, in comparison to the pharmaceutical industry, and the need to ensure a robust UK based supply chain so that the UK can react more quickly in the event of another pandemic.
Next steps
Our message was clearly articulated and appeared to be understood and Lord Bethell and his team were receptive to our issues. We are hopeful that our offer to be involved in training the workforce required to staff the new testing platforms in Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 will be taken up.
Following the meeting I have written to Lord Bethell reinforcing our message of support and I will inform members of any response or progress as soon as I have any news.