Scotland Regional Council activity and launch of the new webinar series

The Scotland Regional Council met regularly in 2025, recruiting new members and remaining active in representing the profession at both Scotland and UK-wide events.

In 2025, the Scotland Regional Council launched its first online webinar series, aiming to bring together communities of pathologists and laboratory medicine specialists to discuss and learn more about advances in a variety of areas of laboratory medicine practice. These webinars are typically held on a Friday lunchtime and run for 1 hour. They are also recorded for access to all members via the College website after the live session.

Diagnostic stewardship webinar

Our first webinar was held in May 2025 and focused on diagnostic stewardship. The webinar covered the principles of applying stewardship over laboratory testing, not only to promote best practice but to also reduce waste and unnecessary testing.

Dr Kate Templeton, Consultant Clinical Scientist in Virology in Edinburgh, led a discussion on examples of applying these principles to tests and the importance of ensuring appropriate demand is placed on laboratories.

Dr Sara Jenks, Consultant Clinical Biochemist in Edinburgh, discussed the patient safety aspects that also importantly underpin diagnostic stewardship. She explored how best we can utilise test results in clinical practice and thus promote higher clinical effectiveness in laboratory medicine practice. A focus on laboratory and test-requesting IT systems considered how these systems can be adapted to drive diagnostic stewardship initiatives forward more effectively.

Patient-centric sampling and new digital tools

Next in the series was a talk delivered by Dr Karen Perkins, Principal Clinical Scientist, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Perkins led a session around patient-centric sampling, and how this novel way of sampling in the community can promote equity and improved patient outcomes for certain under-served groups of patients in particular. Dr Perkins’s talk stimulated us to think about how we can consider novel ways of working in laboratories to better meet the needs of a growing patient population with diverse needs, and really think about patients at the centre of laboratory medicine practice.

The discussions among members following the webinars have reflected a keen interest in the use of certain new digital tools, newer sampling methods and developing new testing pathways that have an overlap and link with a number of pathology and laboratory medicine disciplines.

Continued work

Up next in January will be a session on genomics testing, led by Dr Sian Morgan, Consultant Clinical Scientist and Laboratory Director in Cardiff. With a clear drive in future government visions to harness genomic testing, this is clearly an area that will affect us all. We look forward to hearing more about this in Dr Morgan’s talk.

While we all, as laboratory medicine and pathology specialists, work across many specialties and sub-specialties, there are numerous important aspects of our work that overlap and interlock. For example, on a testing level, more molecular analyses in infection and cancer diagnostics mean we are working more closely together across these disciplines. Similarly, with advances in flow cytometry tests, immunologists and haematologists continue to collaborate. On a patient sampling level, the blood sciences have come together to collaborate on newer ways of adopting pre-analytical pathways. There are many more examples of where we can benefit and learn together.

The Scotland Regional Council continues to work and stimulate collaboration across our disciplines in many ways, including the new webinar series. Importantly, we continue to provide a space for all members of our profession to raise and highlight what the profession recommends and needs to maintain high-quality, safe patient care.

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