Workforce planning for professionals, or professional workforce planning?
At its simplest, workforce shortages at established organisations occur when fewer people want to join than choose to leave. In healthcare, local availability of appropriately skilled people is just part of the story. Many factors affect the attractiveness of a role at a particular organisation. An uncompetitive salary relative to alternative employment and local costs…
Innovation in pathology: a pipe dream or an essential part of the future?
As in many other high-volume industries, pathology instruments capable of consistently performing analyses at high speeds have been developed over time. Consolidating these instruments into complex automation systems has resulted in a step-change in productivity in chemistry and bacteriology laboratories. More recently, the innovation of digital vision systems that avoid the need for the physical…
A growing demand with fewer resources: A conundrum for UK diagnostics provision
The Covid pandemic may have receded for many but, for those working in healthcare, ongoing significant and growing demand for diagnostic services suggests we are now in a ‘new normal’. We question here whether the workload predictions in the years prior to 2020 continue to hold and, if so, from when might we reasonably check…
Diagnostic provision at a time of collaboration: a note for members of NHS Trust Boards
Debate continues over whether pathology provision across any particular geography would benefit from a closer collaborative model. However, NHS England and Improvement have, for several years, led parallel pathology improvement workstreams through its Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) and pathology consolidation programmes. The programmes take different approaches and have differing emphases, but both view…
Time for a renewed focus on benchmarking in pathology?
Benchmarking as a managerial technique has been around for several decades. It has become an essential component of the modern manager’s toolkit, used to ‘shine a light’ into areas where further, more detailed, analysis is likely to result in tangible improvement in performance and greater certainty of return on investment. However, for benchmarking to be…