Sarah May, Deputy Chief Executive at the IBMS, talks through some programme highlights for this year’s Congress.
This programme is essential learning material for laboratory managers, section heads, trainers and quality managers – in fact, anyone with an interest in or responsibility for education, training management, team leadership or quality management. Our aim is to enable delegates to attend as many of these lecture sessions as possible without a programme clash.
In response to the interest in these topics, we are starting both the education and the quality programmes on Sunday but, due to the high demand for good, clear, quality information, we are running a similar programme on the Wednesday of Congress too.
Education, education, education
Our education programme starts on Sunday with a focus on training: how to construct a programme, learning styles, help with training difficulties, collection of evidence and how to keep your staff and colleagues motivated. This programme continues through Monday, with an examination of the advanced role and the importance of the Higher Specialist Diploma as a route to Band 7 roles.
It also sets out to answer some of the current problems of providing supervision in multi-site working and how to deliver a training strategy for a multi-site service. We will also be bringing you the most up-to-date information on apprenticeships to help trainers and managers understand their options and obligations.
Help for managers
We fully understand the challenges facing managers in pathology and our Tuesday management programme is specifically designed to help you. Of key importance to everyone is the ongoing pathology transformation programme and we are devoting the whole morning to an examination of the experiences, outfalls and challenges associated with transformation and consolidation plans with insight from all four UK countries.
We also will be examining the issues that are often overlooked, but which biomedical scientists are required to manage; those of staff support, maintenance of training placements, and IT and logistical issues.
The afternoon programme looks at other key challenges of assessing management competence, a requirement for ISO 15189 accreditation, and then goes on to give consideration to the support and management of an under-performing manager. This leads naturally into capability, safety and informing the HCPC. This is an intense day of key lectures delivered by speakers with first-hand experience of the issues, which you may yourself encounter. It is expected to be an extremely popular programme.
Quality management
We recognise that high-quality information on quality management issues is always going to be popular and over-subscribed, which is why we are offering quality programmes on both Sunday and Wednesday at Congress.
Our intention is that this will help laboratories to send as many people as possible to these key programmes. Our approach is to deliver a quality tool kit in lecture form that is designed to give you information and confidence to manage all the quality aspects of your laboratory service. Our lectures will cover the basic information on how best to approach ISO accreditation and then take you through management of risk, adding new tests, multi-site accreditation, how to be a successful quality manager and life beyond ISO accreditation.
As with all our programmes, you are going to hear from people who are experts in their field and who understand the issues and challenges that their audience are facing as they have been there themselves. These four days are promising to be highly popular options
at Congress.
For more information on the Congress, visit ibms.org