A Review of Clinical Laboratory Education, Training and Progression: Historical Challenges, the Impact of COVID-19 and Future Considerations.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a wide global impact on society, including the clinical laboratory workforce. This historically underrepresented group of highly skilled professionals have now started to gain the attention they deserve. There had already been dramatic changes to laboratory training over the past 2 decades resulting from advances in technology, changes to service needs, and as a consequence of Pathology reform initiatives. The pandemic has had an additional impact. Higher education institutions and students adapted to emergency remote teaching. Clinical laboratories faced unprecedented challenges to meet COVID-19 testing demands and adjust to new ways of working whilst maintaining their usual high quality service provision. Training, assessment, and development arrangements had to convert to online platforms to maintain social distancing. The pandemic also had a global impact on mental health and wellbeing, further impacting learning/training. Despite these challenges, there have been many positive outcomes. This review highlights pre- and post-pandemic training and assessment for clinical laboratory professionals, with particular emphasis on Biomedical Scientists, outlining recent improvements among a history of challenges. There is increasing interest surrounding this vital workforce, accelerated thanks to the pandemic. This new public platform has emphasised the importance of quality diagnostic services in the patient pathway and in the response to national crises. The ability to maintain a quality service that is prepared for the future is grounded in the effective training and development of its staff. All of which can only be achieved with a workforce that is sustainable, invested in, and given a voice.

Redesigning Biomedical Science Practicum towards a New Frontier

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, majority of the Biomedical Science students were not able to undergo their clinical internship at diagnostic laboratories and this has created an impact on students’ skills and the future of the Malaysian healthcare system. Hence, our objective was to implement arevolutionized Biomedical Science practicum completely in a virtual environment, without compromising the learning outcomes during the pandemic in 2021. To achieve the intended learning outcomes, various online teaching-learning and assessment activities were carefully curated in accordance to standard program guidelines, learning outcomes, student learning time and thorough analysis of actual student logbooks. Learning materials were reinforced with various initiatives such as actual engagements with real-life scenarios via synchronous meetings with external panelists from hospitals. Online video-log (Vlog) and a logbook of daily activities were used as part of the assessment to ensure that students were able to learn and reflect on the activities performed. The study showed that all students displayed increased confidence levels in medical laboratory skills. They were also able to apply them in real-life situations due to the clear instructions and realistic experience via the virtual learning activities. Therefore, students who participated in the virtual practicum demonstrated almost similar levels of performance when compared to the students who went for physical practicums in the year 2020. Our virtual practicum has achieved its intended outcomes of empowering students with similar skills as those who underwent physical clinical placements in diagnostic laboratories. Those skills include successful acquisition of discipline-specific knowledge, collaborative and communication skills, as well as solid experimental methods and good laboratory practices. © 2022 by the authors.

COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons learned for undergraduate research training.

This article reports a session from the virtual international 2021 IUBMB/ASBMB workshop, "Teaching Science on Big Data." The awareness of using publicly available research data sets for undergraduate training is low in certain parts of the world. Final year projects always revolve around wet-lab based projects. The challenges occur during COVID-19 pandemic when it forces full lockdown to the nation, but at the same time faculty members need to provide consistent training to the students and projects to work with. We aim to identify supervisors in the faculty that are ready to convert their proposed project from wet-lab to an online-based project. As coordinators of the course we created an online survey to identify projects that can be converted into dry-lab/online projects. Our surveys identified only 32.5% projects implemented dry-lab/online based projects. Most academicians described that they are not ready or familiar to apply changes for their research design. With the unknown future of the world living with COVID-19 and directional changes of life science research toward big data driven research indeed we should be ready to adopt such changes. Awareness on reusing public data sets as tools for research should be provided to strengthen undergraduate training. Life science undergraduates should be exposed to reusing public data sets as these materials are readily available case studies that allow in depth exploration to answer specific research questions. Members of the faculty should take part to pave the way for them, ensuring that they understand that life science research revolves around a multidisciplinary field.

COVID-19 pandemic deep learning implementations of prediction of disease with data analysis and real-time face-mask detection with camera

In biomedical sciences, data mining skills are used to research and provide predictions to aid in the identification and classification of diseases. Controlling the spread of Corona Virus Disease requires screening a high number of reported cases for effective isolation and treatment (COVID-19). Infective laboratory testing (Pathogenic) is the benchmark in science, but it is time-consuming because of the high rate of false-negative? findings. To treat the illness, there is an urgent need for rapid and dependable diagnosis techniques.We wanted to create a deep learning system that could retrieve COVID-19 pictorial features from Computed tomography applying COVID-19 radiographic enhancements. In earlier study investigations, machine learning methods were employed in the prediction and categorization of COVID-19. This research, on the other hand, concentrates on the different effects of certain image processing techniques rather than on optimising these processes through the use of improved approaches. The CT image dataset benefits from the extraction of classified correctness. The DeTraC model, a previously published convolutional neural network architecture based on class decomposition, is used in this study to increase the performance of pre-trained models in detecting COVID-19 instances from chest X-ray pictures. This may be accomplished by including a class breakdown layer into the pre-trained models. © 2021 IEEE.

A Virtual Approach to Promote Inter-Professional Learning (IPL) Between Biomedical Science and Medicine in Higher Education for the Benefit of Patient Care.

In the clinical setting, collaboration between multidisciplinary teams is core to providing effective patient care. The delivery of traditional interprofessional education is associated with a number of logistical challenges, which were heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic. This workshop was developed to bring together Biomedical Science and Medical students using an online platform. The workshop consisted of (1) defining interprofessional education, (2) introducing the role of the Pathology laboratory, (3) Professional registration with regulatory bodies and (4) an insight into Covid-19 laboratory diagnosis. The session was supported by mixed group breakout rooms and interactive polling. Thirty four percent of students completed a post-workshop online survey which included open and closed questions. Thematic analysis revealed a better understanding the role of the pathology laboratory in diagnosing disease, an increased awareness of the similarities and differences in the roles of a Biomedical Scientist and a Medic and the importance of a multi-disciplinary team in achieving effective patient care. Quantitative analysis of survey data revealed that the majority of students reported positive experiences of interprofessional education online. Approximately 90% of students agreed that the workshop enabled them to increase their understanding of their own roles within healthcare, in addition to increasing their understanding of the roles of other healthcare professionals. 74.3% of participants reported that working with students from a different programme provided an alternative perspective. Seventy nine percent of students agreed that the online format enabled interactivity and discussion of the tasks. Of the 204 students, 85% engaged with the four polls during the workshop. This online workshop enabled discussion between degree programmes, enabled interactivity and allowed the learning outcomes to be met. Universities should embrace online platforms to provide a novel, engaging and effective interprofessional educational experience.

Challenges in PhD education due to COVID-19 - disrupted supervision or business as usual: a cross-sectional survey of Swedish biomedical sciences graduate students.

BACKGROUND: It remains unclear to what extent the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the normal progression of biomedical and medical science graduate programs and if there was a lasting impact on the quality and quantity of supervision of PhD-students. To date, multiple editorials and commentaries indicate the severity of the disruption without providing sufficient evidence with quantifiable data. METHODS: An online survey was submitted to the administrative offices of biomedical and medical PhD-programs at eight major universities in Sweden to gauge the impact of the pandemic on the students. It consisted of multiple-choice and open-ended questions where students could provide examples of positive and/or negative supervision strategies. Open answered questions were coded as either examples of positive or negative support. RESULTS: PhD students were divided into two groups: those with improved or unchanged supervision during the pandemic (group 1, n = 185), versus those whose supervision worsened (group 2, n = 69). Group 1 received more help from supervisors and more frequent supervision via both online and alternative platforms (email/messages and telephone). There was no significant difference in educational-stage, gender or caretaking responsibilities between the groups. CONCLUSIONS: It is important for the scientific community to learn how to provide the best possible supervision for PhD students during the pandemic. Our data suggests that more frequent supervision, and using a diverse array of meeting platforms is helpful. In addition, it is important for the students to feel that they have their supervisor's emotional support. Several students also expressed that they would benefit from an extension of their PhD programs due to delays caused by the pandemic.

British Journal of Biomedical Science in 2020. What have we learned?

Each year the British Journal of Biomedical Science publishes a 'What have we learned' editorial designed to introduce readers within the major disciplines of laboratory medicine to developments outside their immediate area. In addition it is designed to inform a wider readership of the advances in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. To this end, in 2020 the journal published 39 articles covering the disciplines within Biomedical Science in the 4 issues comprising volume 77. These included a review of COVID-19 in this issue, 27 original articles, 6 Biomedical Science 'In Brief' and 4 case histories. 27 of the articles involved molecular techniques, with one of these comparing results with a mass spectrometry based method. The preponderance of molecular genetic studies gives us a good idea of the likely future direction of the disciplines.