Events in 2023

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) Patient Blood Management (PBM) team, with the support of the London Regional Transfusion Committee, created a remote, no-cost education group for biomedical scientists aimed at providing ongoing professional development for transfusion laboratory professionals. The popularity of the group led to the continuation of the group beyond the pandemic and membership being opened to all healthcare professionals interested in blood transfusion.

The group convenes monthly and invites professional/industry experts to deliver lectures on specialist areas of blood transfusion, followed by discussion. The curriculum is flexible and responsive to feedback, incorporating key recommendations, such as those found in the annual SHOT report. The group has covered a wide range of topics, including antibody identification, appropriate use of blood components, haemoglobinopathies, advances in information technology, inventory management, gender reassignment, provision of rare blood, transfusion delays, and emergency preparedness, among others.

Over 2800 healthcare professionals worldwide have joined the group, with an average attendance of 165 individuals per meeting. Survey results from 1390 delegates between April 2022 and April 2023 demonstrated high evaluation of the education provided during the sessions, with an average rating of 4.72 out of 5 for information quality and 4.58 out of 5 for information relevance to their day-to-day work. Furthermore, 99.1% of all respondents believed that the education enabled them to offer a better service to patients and service users.

The NHSBT PBM team's remote and accessible model has been successful in providing ongoing education and continuing professional development for blood transfusion professionals beyond the pandemic. This cost-effective model has become a regular feature in hospital transfusion continuing professional development, enhancing individual and service performance, and could be a valuable consideration for other healthcare disciplines.

Meet the Microbiology Experts

Training for Biomedical Scientists is a fast-growing field and has become a crucial factor in the efficiency of histopathology departments. It has many benefits from improving turnaround times, career progression and utilising Pathologist’s time more effectively. As more Biomedical Scientists are performing dissection the responsibility to teach, and train is down to the already practicing BMS dissectors rather than the Pathologists. It is imperative that training is performed correctly and suitably for the individuals, the patients, and the department as a whole. Many aspects need to be considered to deliver effective training and being fully prepared and organised for training can make the process a successful one.

The public health side of drug misuse

Digital cervical cytology: The Monklands experience

How to report staining intensity for flow cytometry EQA exercises

This session provides an overview of the key changes to the ISO 15189 standard and explains the UKAS transition process including deadlines and actions to be taken by accredited organisations.

The same session is being run on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to ensure as many delegates as possible are able to attend.

Promoting and supporting training and education is an integral part of the work of UK NEQAS. As such the online Digital Morphology for CPD scheme (DM) was introduced some years ago as a companion to our glass-slide blood films for morphology (BF) EQA scheme. DM has been very successful and registration currently stands at just over 4,000 participants. DM recently underwent a major change when it was moved to a new platform and is now hosted on the UK NEQAS Haematology EQATE system.

The new EQATE platform offers significant flexibility over the old and allows for the development of additional modules, for example the recently introduced Haemosiderin cytochemistry EQA. Other new modules and features are proposed with some actively under design and testing. This presentation will look at how Digital Morphology and the EQATE platform have evolved, where we are with regards to the currently available modules, some of the challenges we face and a look at some future developments.

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).

This webinar provides an in-depth focus on the recognition and prevention of technical issues that occur in ICC, and guidance on ways to ensure ICC quality in diagnostic Cellular Pathology.