Current Climate & Challenges
NHS pathology services are amid a critical bottleneck: backlogs, IT failures, and workforce shortages are all undermining reliability and patient safety. An IT upgrade failure in West Yorkshire caused 10,000 blood tests lost or delayed, exposing patients to potential harm.
Histopathology labs are struggling to meet turnaround KPIs—only 98% of tests processed within 10 days in pilot sites—due to staff shortages and legacy infrastructure.
Meanwhile, digital pathology adoption varies greatly across regions, and reliance on outdated messaging standards (UN‑EDIFACT/Read Code) prevents full interoperability and slows result delivery.
Timeliness of the Event
Launched 3 July 2025, the NHS 10‑Year Health Plan outlines three bold shifts—hospital → community, analogue → digital, sickness → prevention—and identifies diagnostics as a key enabler.
The Institute of Biomedical Science states pathology underpins early detection and equitable screening, yet stresses that community services and home-testing require quality governance and workforce investment.
With a £3.4 bn capital commitment to data and tech from 2025/26, there's now funding to drive digital pathology transformation. This summit arrives at a pivotal moment—when national ambition meets local implementation needs.
Key Subjects Covered
- Digital transformation: Scaling digital histopathology, AI‑aided slide reporting, full adoption of FHIR standards, and retiring legacy messaging frameworks.
- Workload & staffing resilience: Addressing workforce shortages through career pipelines, advanced roles, and training consistent with the NHS Workforce Plan.
- Infrastructure & resilience: Mitigating IT failure risks by strengthening lab information management systems, service continuity, and cybersecurity.
- Governance & standards: Ensuring accreditation, quality control, and interoperability across community and hospital settings, aligning with IBMS guidance.
- Operational innovation: Embedding digital workflow pilots—with real-world pathology hubs extending services into neighbourhood centres as specified by the Plan.
- Patient safety & backlogs: Creating real‑time monitoring, early-warning models, and recovery strategies to prevent issues like the West Yorkshire test losses.
- Genomics in Pathology: Positioning pathology as the gateway for genomic medicine, since most genomic samples (e.g. tumour biopsies, blood, tissue) originate in pathology labs. Expanding integration of genomic testing into diagnostic pathways for cancer, rare disease, and infectious disease surveillance.
Why Attend
This summit is vital for laboratory directors, ICS commissioners, biomedical scientists, digital leads, and risk managers:
- Understand strategic alignment: Learn how pathology services can underpin the NHS Plan’s shift to community-based, digitally enabled care.
- Explore digital-first blueprints: Hear from labs leading digital transformation—including AI-supported histopathology and FHIR migration.
- Acquire resilience tools: Get templates for IT risk management, lab system redundancy planning, and cyber incident response.
- Strengthen workforce strategies: Discover workforce development models drawing on advanced roles and local training initiatives.
- Ensure governance excellence: Share frameworks for quality assurance, accreditation, and governance in both hospital and community settings.
- Network across sectors: Connect with national bodies (IBMS, RCPath), tech providers, NHS leadership, and frontline lab teams delivering diagnostics.
- Leave with implementation guides: Walk away with digital transformation roadmaps, AI integration models, workforce plans, and quality regimes tailored for pathology.
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