Events during September 2023

Benign glandular histology as potential for BLEC

Update on endocervical adencarcinomas

The management of low grade smear abnormalities has posed problems for over 30 years and these will be described in some detail leading on to the most recent difficulty caused by the HPV Triage Pathway in the Cervical Screening Programme. The concept of HPV Entrapment Syndrome will be introduced and management strategies to deal with this difficult problem will be discussed. As well as explaining what HPV Entrapment means, there will be a detailed case presentation of a typical patient followed by a review of some of the numerous smear abnormalities that prevented her from leaving the Triage Programme.

Role of MDT – Clinical Perspective; Colposcopy for patients with learning difficulties

From earlier work that I had done in a sexual health setting, I identified that there were barriers for women with a learning disability attending for cervical screening. I was invited to talk to a group of women about cervical screening as part of an initiative called 'The Josephine Project'. Josephine is an anatomically correct cloth doll which is used for health promotion purposes - she has body parts which can be detached and has a 'space' in her head where women can put ideas on paper. Within a mock up clinic, Josephine, along with her friends (the women in the group), attended the sexual health clinic to have a cervical sample taken. This work was very successful and led to several women taking up the offer of screening.

Myself and Jilly realised that as Nurse Colposcopists this work could be translated into a secondary care setting and so Josephine was invited to the colposcopy clinic following an abnormal cervical screening result. This presentation discusses some of the barriers for the women with a learning disability and how 'Josephine' came to life to help and support some of those women.

Chronic lung infection is the leading cause of morbidity and early mortality for people with cystic fibrosis (pwCF). Microbiological surveillance to detect lung pathogens is recommended as best practise in CF patient care. Here we studied pathogen detection in forty pwCF over several years. We found that microbiological culture, the diagnostic gold standard, was significantly disparate to targeted culture-independent approaches for detection and determination of chronic infection status of two important pathogens in CF. Pathogen detection was significantly lower by culture and consequently infection status was also misclassified in the majority of cases.

In particular, the extent of chronic infection by both Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus not realised with culture was striking. Our findings have implications for the development of infection and clinical care of pwCF. Future longitudinal studies with greater patient numbers will be needed to establish the full extent of the clinical implications indicated from this study.

Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157:H7 has been the most clinically significant STEC serotype in the UK for over four decades. However, over the last 10 years we have observed a decrease in STEC O157:H7 and an increase in non-O157 STEC serotypes, such as O26:H11. Little is known about the microbiology and epidemiology of non-O157 STEC. This presentation describes the virulence, clinical outcomes and epidemiology of non-O157 STEC, focusing on the most commonly detected serotype, STEC O26:H11.

This presentation will give delegates a:

Real world evaluation of a syndromic panel compared to traditional Gram stain and culture
The presentation will cover:

An outline of the trial
A summary of findings
The local experience of the process
Brief local case studies that show how the multiplex PCR panel results could have positively affected patient management.

Increasing antimicrobial resistance observed globally in key Gram-negative bacteria and failure of the antimicrobial development pipeline to keep up has left clinicians with few remaining treatment options. This presentation will: i) highlight the current gaps in our antimicrobial armamentarium (with a focus on the World Health Organisation critical priority pathogens); ii) give an overview of new antimicrobials that have reached phase 3 clinical trials and other therapeutic approaches currently in the pipeline; and iii) share experience from the reference laboratory.

EUCAST – striving towards a complete system