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8th Dec 2016, 10:37 AM
#1
What is resilience?
The UK Transfusion Laboratory Collaborative (UKTLC) would really value your views on resilience to help us decide on any future work needed:
1. What do we mean by the term resilience? - team, individuals, other?
2. Do we have evidence to indicate there is a lack of resilience within UK Blood transfusion labs when faced with challenges – inspections, accreditation, laboratory mergers etc ?
3. How can we improve this ?
4. What factors may affect resilience?
Look forward to your responses
Many thanks
Rashmi
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9th Dec 2016, 05:42 PM
#2
[QUOTE=Rashmi;3041]The UK Transfusion Laboratory Collaborative (UKTLC) would really value your views on resilience to help us decide on any future work needed:
1. What do we mean by the term resilience? - team, individuals, other?
2. Do we have evidence to indicate there is a lack of resilience within UK Blood transfusion labs when faced with challenges – inspections, accreditation, laboratory mergers etc ?
3. How can we improve this ?
4. What factors may affect resilience?
Look forward to your responses
Many thanks
Rashmi
1. I cannot but think that resilience MUST involve both an individual AND a team, because if either a team or an individual is not resilient, then the entire laboratory has to be affected in some way.
2. The number of "simple" antibody problems received from hospital laboratories into the reference laboratory in which I used to work has markedly increased, suggesting to me that the ability to successfully undertake antibody identification within hospital laboratories is being compromised. Whether this inability is due to lack of time, as a knock-on effect of having fewer staff in core hours, as extended hours are worked with the same staff numbers as were employed before the introduction of extended hours, or a lack of knowledge on how to perform antibody identification (possibly due to having inadequate time to train the staff to perform antibody identification), or a combination of the two, I am unsure. Certainly, when I have been marking examination scripts, there appears to be a disturbing lack of depth and a narrowness of theoretical knowledge about blood group antibodies, antigens and techniques, although there has been a steady improvement in the knowledge of management and quality - possibly at the expense of the theoretical knowledge mentioned above - as a result of the requirements for knowledge of the quality system - in other words, there needs to be a re-balancing exercise as, at present, staff are being tested for competency in performing tests, but not being tested for why they are performing the tests.
3. There has to be sufficient time given for education, as well as training, otherwise there will come a time when even the higher echelons of the Biomedical Scientists in the laboratories, those who are there to be asked for advice when necessary, will no longer be able to give this advice, as they will not know the answers themselves. The only way this can happen is for management, at the VERY highest level (board level), to be convinced of the danger to patients, if this knowledge gap is not closed. They will have to realise that the only way to do this is to give staff time to educate and be educated, and this WILL involve increasing the budget, so that more staff are employed to allow this education to take place.
4. Obviously, from the answers given above, more staff are required, which will involve an increase in budget, and not so doing is a false economy, as paying compensation to the patient's survivors after a transfusion accident may well prove very expensive in itself. In addition, if hospital laboratories are sending more and more "simple" antibody samples to reference laboratories, the reference laboratories themselves will lose resilience, and will be forced to send on more and more samples to the IBGRL, which will, as a result, lose it's own resilience. In addition to this, the situation is becoming urgent, as the Biomedical Scientists who are in charge of transfusion laboratories are aging, and many are now beginning to retire, with nobody coming up behind with the same knowledge and experience. THIS IS A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN.
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11th Dec 2016, 08:43 PM
#3
From a personal point, resilience is both team and individual, both interdependent. As a manager, having a supportive and capable team of Seniors and other colleagues around me now enables us to meet the demands of inspections, and more importantly to continue with improvements needed. At last I am now able to develop both my team, myself and succession plan. This took a long time to achieve and it was only by the MHRA finally citing staffing deficiencies as being a major cause of problems.
Where there is lack of team resilience due to various causes, then there is increased risk to patients and staff.
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