Haematology and Transfusion Science – 2025 review results

Current priority areas

• 10 Year Health Plan for England: fit for the future
• Science in healthcare: Delivering the NHS Long Term Plan – The Chief Scientific Officer’s strategy

Stakeholder feedback

Feedback collecting through the Curriculum Library survey collected between January 2024 and November 2025. All stakeholder feedback is presented verbatim.

Programme

• There are 2 issues with the Haematology and transfusion STP programme structure which is problematic both in terms of delivery and breadth of learning:
  • The programme effectively requires the student to sub-specialise in either haematology or transfusion due to the requirement of the student to select elective modules. This results in disproportionate learning and experience across haem and BT. This is not appropriate for a pre-registration programme. It should be delivering equal learning and experience across both areas with the target outcome of training and developing an excellent clinical scientist who has the appropriate foundation to work in Haem and/or BT. I have previously participated in the STP curriculum review and actually resigned due to this issue. There was a tension between other reviewers who over-represented highly specialist haematology, and NHSBT blood transfusion. The polarisation of opinion has led to an unbalanced curriculum that is not serving student who do not work in highly specialised areas.
  • The mandatory genomics module is problematic in terms of securing training rotations and can actually prevent organisations hosting a STP student if they are relying on the co-operation of another organisation. This also puts significant pressure on regional genomics hubs to accept students. I have been fortunate to secure this for our new STP’s but I can see it could be a major barrier for others. Although genomics is an important part of the curriculum, I think it is disproportionately represented in the overall curriculum.
  • When I was participating as a STP curriculum reviewer I felt that there was too much emphasis on highly specialised techniques and was considerably overlapping with the HSST curriculum. I felt that STP should be concentrating on developing an excellent clinical scientist with a breadth of knowledge across Haem and BT, as a platform for continued post-registration experience and preparation for HSST. Again, the curriculum reviewers in the group had polarised opinions and (perhaps understandably) wanted the curriculum to serve their specialist areas of haematology or transfusion practice, which in my opinion left a gap that is not serving STP students who are not based in specialist laboratories.
• There are some training activities or assessments, that seem to be generic, patient facing activities in some modules that are clearly not very well thought out for a laboratory based specialism. Patient contact in Haem and transfusion is very limited and when it is it is in the shadowing of clinical staff. Expecting STP trainees to be able to sign off on OCE that are based on patient interactions or care is unrealistic.
  • Also, Entrustable Training Activities is fundamentally an unprovable type of work based assessment. As a trainee, I am not registered HCPC scientist. In many areas of the speciality, it is a legal requirement to be registered before performing certain tasks. How do you provide evidence that you are competent and entrustable to a task you cannot legally perform?
  • Finally, some of the specific training activities are extremely difficult to arrange and perform depending on your training location, e.g. tasks involving clinical trials, not all trainees have access to clinical trial facilities? I believe the speciality as a whole needs an overview and someone with better speciality knowledge and experience within a science role in the speciality specifically should reassess the relevance and accessibility of the curriculum.

S-HT-R1 Introduction to Haematology

• no feedback received

S-HT-R2 Introduction to Transfusion

• no feedback received

S-HT-S1 Application of Techniques, Interpretation and Differential Diagnosis

Training activities

• 10
  • training activity task- These are training activities that are relying on trainees coming to Genomics laboratories; firstly can I ask that this was the intention of this TA, given that Haematology STPs do a compulsory rotation in Genomics? Based on contact from Hematology STPs, this is not covered by their labs. It is not a small ask for us to deliver all this to a phase 2 STP standard (plus a phase 3 TA- will feedback separately about this) and this will be of limited use to trainees if these are not techniques covered by haematology.

The use of the word “Perform” is unhelpful in this training activity. Our own STPs do not get this opportunity to “perform” these methods, i.e. do the lab work. I would suggest replacing with “Analyse and Interpret” (really, I think this should be “Observation” but that does not fit with Phase 2).

There is a spelling error in this training activity; it should be MLPA and not MPLA.

“Copy number assessment e.g. cytogenetics”. Cytogenetics is not a “molecular method”. It is mentioned in S-HT-S2 TA11 so I suggest removing this from this TA unless it’s a desired option here, in which case the term “molecular methods” in the TA title should be something like “Genomic methods”.

“Expression analysis” is not something that’s routinely performed at Genomics labs- perhaps it’s an option available in Haematology departments? If not, please consider removing this.

• • training activity type- DTA is appropriate rather than ETA.  Though OTA would be more achievable and an appropriate level for trainees. I appreciated there are not supposed to be OTAs in 2nd phase modules – can exceptions be made more generally for activities not delivered by the host department, I wonder? Other examples would be Cancer Genomics specialty TAs S-CG-S2 TA2, S-CG-S1 TA3, S-CG-S3 TA3 where we have the reverse issue as Genomic labs.
  • training activity considerations- “Maintenance and basic troubleshooting”; this does not feel achievable for a genomics lab. This would not be in the remit of clinical scientists in our laboratory and we cannot have STPs from non-Genomics disciplines doing technical work when this is not what we deliver for our own STPs.

S-HT-S2 Specialist Haematology

Training activities

• 11
  • training activity task- We are being asked to covered the “molecular” and “Karyotyping/cytogenetics” part of this TA in Genomics; firstly can I ask that this was the intention of this TA, given that Haematology STPs do a compulsory rotation in Genomics? Based on contact from Hematology STPs, this is not covered by their labs. It is not a small ask for us to deliver all this to a phase 3 STP standard (plus a phase 2 TA- see separate feedback) and this will be of limited use to trainees if these are not techniques covered by haematology.
  • training activity type- DTA is appropriate rather than ETA.  Though OTA would be more achievable and an appropriate level for trainees. I appreciated there are not supposed to be OTAs in 2nd phase modules – can exceptions be made more generally for activities not delivered by the host department, I wonder? Other examples would be Cancer Genomics specialty TAs S-CG-S2 TA2, S-CG-S1 TA3, S-CG-S3 TA3 where we have the reverse issue as Genomic labs.

S-HT-S3 Transfusion – Antenatal Serology

• no feedback received

S-HT-S4 Transfusion – Pre-compatibility Testing

• no feedback received

S-HT-S5 Advanced Therapies and Stem Cells

• no feedback received

Changes made

Module level changes

Programme level changes

• no changes made
  

Periodic review

This specialty curriculum requires significant change beyond the scope of an annual review.

Response – no

Rationale

Please provide an overview of the rationale for why the proposed changes are needed or why changes were not needed, with reference to stakeholder feedback.

Response

Changes have been made to the curriculum following specific and reasonable feedback from users. We have made changes following feedback to certain modules where students were expected to select and perform certain tests that were potentially only available at specialist testing sites. The low number of sites and availability of placements made completion of these tasks very difficult for students. This had been reviewed and Performing has now been removed from certain criteria. Where we felt process’ were key and routinely available Perform was kept as a requirement.

Again taking on board specific feedback we have amended some criteria that inferred students were required to write reports or make clinical judgements on “live” patient samples or cases. This would not be appropriate in some cases for NON HCPC registered students. These criteria have been changed to allow students to perform the task on simulated cases.

There is specific feedback regarding specialisation of students into either Haematology OR Transfusion, and as reviewers we agree this appears to be the case, and also agree that the student should have a good grounding in both areas rather than having to choose one route. We feel that this change will potentially require significant alteration or changes to weighting for the other modules within the curriculum and requires further consideration in future reviews.

I confirm I have reviewed the Reflective Practice Guidance for ETAs and DTAs and have made any changes necessary.

Specialty Lead Editor signature: Robert Lees (Transfusion)
Date: 30 December 2025

Specialty Lead Editor signature: Josephine Goodwin (Haematology)
Date: 30 December 2025

Change control - completed by the school

Programme structure

Completed by: Chris Fisher
Date: 7 January 2026

Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) mapping

• Change to a single learning outcome, all relevant HCPC SOPS are met.

Completed by: Chris Fisher
Date: 7 January 2026