IBMS Congress 2017

There was a strong Viapath presence at the IBMS Congress this year with many Viapath employees speaking on a variety of topics: Professor Jonathan Edgeworth, Viapath’s Medical Director, spoke in the plenary session on Transformation and Consolidation and outlined some of the issues that Viapath has faced since its inception.

David Wells, Director of Operations for Reference Services lectured on a range of subjects from molecular pathology to multi site accreditation; Erin Mozely talked about Inherited Metabolic Disease: screening and diagnosis; Dr Guy Orchard spoke about Haematoxylin and a pilot EQA scheme for Mohs; Karolina Wojcik had a talk entitled A comparison of BRAF V600E immunohistochemistry and molecular screening in 71 cases of malignant melanoma (for which she won an award for best short paper);  Fiona Denham had a lecture entitled How to be a successful quality manager; Dr John Mee gave two presentations on dermatology and Dr Gary Moore gave a talk called Beyond textbook diagnosis.

You can listen to  Professor Edgeworth’s talk in its entirety at https://www.mixcloud.com/ViapathFutureLeaders/professor-jonathan-edgewor...

Podcasts and posters

I was privileged to attend Congress for the whole four days and as well as attending seminars and viewing posters, I promised to produce podcasts;  recording interviews with some of the eminent speakers  and poster presenters.

This seemed like a straight forward thing to do until  I realised that Congress is spread over 9 conference halls, involving approximately 100 speakers and over 2000 delegates, and has the largest healthcare science trade show in the UK.

In preparation, I looked through the list of talks and gave myself the task of setting up at least 3 podcasts each day. As well as liaising with speakers from Viapath, I was able to get in touch with lecturers that I was looking forward to hearing to see if they would be willing to talk to me - I was lucky enough to be able to speak to a few of them!

You can hear all my podcasts from Congress by visiting: https://www.mixcloud.com/ViapathFutureLeaders

Winning Posters

Viapath had a lot of interesting and informative posters on display over the entirety of Congress, ranging from departments such as clinical chemistry through to haemostasis and dermatology. These posters are submitted for judging each day with the best ones in their category receiving a cheque for £150.

On Tuesday, the prize for the virology category was won by Viapath’s Andrea ‘Andi’ Wilson from Virology, based at St Thomas’ Hospital. This was a fantastic achievement especially as  this was the first poster that she had ever produced.

I managed to catch up with Andi for a short chat about the poster too and this can be heard at https://www.mixcloud.com/ViapathFutureLeaders/compilation-of-ibms-congre...

Viapath also had another winner! Charlotte Lee, a trainee biomedical scientist from Immunology at  Kings College Hospital, won the immunology category with her post entitled: Skewed T Follicular Helper Cell Subsets in Common Variable Immunodeficiency