Events during September 2023

The transition to a digital-only Registration Training Portfolio using the ePortfolio platform Onefile, will redefine students, apprentices and laboratory-based staff complete this integral part of their journey to HCPC registration as biomedical scientists and represents an up-to-date approach to education and training.

This talk (the second of three) will demonstrate how Onefile can be used by trainees and trainers to provide an enhanced training experience over traditional paper-based portfolios. We will delve into the use of Onefile to create and upload evidence; set tasks and monitor deadlines; organise meetings and track progress against the HCPC Standards of Proficiency; identify training gaps and create workflows to sign-off each module in the portfolio. We will see how Onefile provides a comprehensive audit trail with minimal user input and how this can be used to help ensure quality education and training in the workplace.

We suggest that this talk will be informative to trainees undertaking version 5.0 of the Registration Training Portfolio, as well as delegates in roles that support trainees, such as training officers/managers and university placement tutors.

Additional talks focusing on other elements of Onefile are scheduled for the lunchtime programme on Wednesday (Hall: 11) and the afternoon subsidiary programme on Thursday (Hall: 4).

Mark Lundy was convicted of killing his wife and daughter in 2002 and again in 2015 after a retrial ordered by the Privy Council. His conviction continues to divide public opinion in New Zealand. A key piece of evidence was the presence of small smears on a shirt which prosecution experts identified as central nervous system tissue relying on immunohistochemistry.

The successful challenge to his original conviction was part motivated by arguments challenging the reliability of the latter in forensic practice. This has again come under scrutiny following a 2016 report by the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The PCAST concluded that there were two important deficiencies in ensuring scientific validity of so-called ‘feature-comparison methods’. These are procedures by which an examiner seeks to determine whether an evidentiary sample is or is not associated with a source sample based on similar features. Proponents of Lundy’s innocence argue that the application of immunohistochemistry must be regarded as a subjective feature-comparison method.

There was a need for (1) clarity about the scientific standards for the validity and reliability of forensic methods and (2) the need to evaluate specific forensic methods to determine whether they have been scientifically established to be valid and reliable. The report emphasized 2 key elements that are required to meet the scientific criteria of foundation validity; (1) a reproducible and consistent procedure and (2) empirical measurements from multiple independent studies of a method’s false positive rate and sensitivity.

It is this author’s position that the manner in which the immunohistochemistry was applied in the Lundy case to identify central nervous system tissue was sufficiently robust in terms of rigor and reproducibility and that to insist otherwise would be tantamount to believing in biological alchemy.

The session will provide an overview of the Histopathology Reporting qualifications outlining the success so far and then will focus on the two new limited scope Reporting qualifications. It will provide guidance on the eligibility criteria for these qualifications, the portfolio requirements and the support needed by candidates from colleagues in order to undertake the qualification.

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

Development of a new EQA programme

Delegates will understand:

What is a quality culture.
Importance of obtaining and maintaining ISO accreditation.
Maintaining and improving quality and compliance.
Key tips for supporting daily quality and compliance.

This lecture will overview previous viral pandemics affecting humans and highlight lessons learned (or not). This lecture will provide the audience with background information relevant to the two subsequent talks on pandemics currently affecting and what might come next. At the end of this talk the audience will have knowledge on some major pathogenic viruses that have impacted hugely on the human population including:

Smallpox; influenza; polio; yellow fever; HIV and Ebola that bring us up to the novel coronavirus outbreaks that have plagued mankind during more recent years.

It is clear that the interaction of humans with animals and the environment has been at the centre of infectious disease emergence and spread through out history. Recent global events have shown that this is still the case, or at least likely to be! Close contact with animals and our collective movements in and out of each others environments has the potential to permit transmission of organisms that have the potential to cause zoonotic or indeed enzoonotic disease. We need to consider this aspect carefully to understand what mitigations we might need to put into place and also what considerations might need to be taken on board in the light of changes to infection patterns as a possible consequence of climate change.

Getting it Right First Time

Meet the Examiner Session