A group of NHS Lanarkshire laboratory staff posted a big win in a poster competition at a major conference.

Claire Richardson, Jacqueline McGuire, Evelyn McEwan, Janice McNicol and Betty Kyle scooped joint first prize for their poster detailing the recent major transformation of NHS Lanarkshire’s Blood Science Service.

The triumph at the Scottish Healthcare Science National Conference in Edinburgh delighted the group as they saw it as a tribute to all the staff who made it happen.

Betty and Janice are lead biomedical scientists for haematology and chemistry respectively, Jacqueline is a consultant clinical scientist and Evelyn is blood sciences technical manager. They all cover the three hospital laboratories in their roles and Claire is a senior biomedical scientist in the blood science laboratory at Wishaw General.

Claire said: “The transformation programme has been a great success.

“It’s led to the development of a service which more effectively matches clinical needs, taking into account quality, availability of service and patient safety.

“Better effectiveness and efficiency can clearly be seen from the vast improvement in turnaround times and in the consistency and comparability of results for patients in Lanarkshire.”

The team, who shared their first prize with a group from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, received £50 of Amazon vouchers to mark their win.

There were around 30 entries for the poster challenge, which asked competitors to outline the innovative ways of working they had pioneered and the local service improvements that deserved to be highlighted to a wider audience.

The changes described on the poster stemmed from a 2011 Laboratory Services Review by NHS Lanarkshire, which recognised significant opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

With around 325 staff in three labs, providing a 24/7 service and doing over 13 million investigations each year, there was a need to tackle the growth in laboratory workload of around eight per cent a year.

The transformation programme modernised laboratory services and changed from a hospital site, departmental-based model to a fully-integrated single service for biochemistry, haematology, microbiology and pathology.

The innovative redesign and reconfiguration has led to the creation of a main blood sciences laboratory at Wishaw with supporting core labs at Hairmyres and Monklands. An additional aspect of the review will see co-location of the pathology laboratories currently based at Wishaw and Monklands to a purpose-built laboratory based on the Monklands site, towards the end of October.

Another bonus is a single managed service contract which has delivered benefits in terms of quality of service, standardisation, economies of scale and cost, ongoing viability of laboratory services and high-quality patient care.