Events in 2023

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).

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.

Many reports have demonstrated the correlation between good team working and better outcomes. This talk explores the value of civility and the cost to our patients of rudeness in the workplace.

Competences for Managers

Immunology online Specialist Diploma programme

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.