NEWS
RCPath report highlights immunology staff shortages
A new report from The Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath) reveals that three- quarters of immunology services in the UK do not currently have enough staff to meet clinical demand.
The Clinical Immunology Workforce Report highlights the essential role of immunologists in diagnosing and treating
immunodeficiencies, allergies, autoimmune conditions and cancers of the immune system. Despite demand for
services rising by an average of 11% each year over the past five years, the consultant workforce has grown by just 0-2% annually. Dr Bernie Croal, RCPath President commented: “Immunology is a small but vital specialty which is fragile and vulnerable to collapse. The shortages we see have a direct effect on patient care – patients face delays to diagnosis and treatment, lack of access to specialists, and worsening health.” Key findings of the report are:
n The UK needs at least 44% more
consultant immunologists (an additional 52 posts) to meet current demand.
n Almost 40% of immunology services have one or more consultant vacancies, and over half of these have been vacant for a year or more.
n A quarter of services operate with just one consultant, with almost half of all services in the UK operating with two consultants, leaving them highly vulnerable to collapse.
n 21% of the current consultant workforce will retire within five years; this rises to 40% within 10 years.
To address the significant challenges faced by immunology services across the UK, RCPath is calling on policymakers and employers across the UK to: establish additional immunology training posts; stronger safeguards in job plans for consultants; improve retention through better support and investment; undertake and strengthen workforce planning for immunology services, ensuring appropriate consultant numbers per population and improved NHS data to capture true workload and workforce numbers. The full report, along with a Clinical Immunology Workforce Briefing paper, is available from the RCPath website.
Proscia expands AWS collaboration
Proscia, a pathology AI company, has announced the next step in its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address two of digital pathology’s most pressing challenges: managing surging data volumes and standardising siloed data.
The company has integrated its Concentriq platform for pathology from drug discovery to diagnostics with AWS HealthImaging to provide laboratories and life sciences organisations with a cloud- native foundation, accelerating routine workflows and fuelling AI-driven precision medicine initiatives. AWS HealthImaging is a service for storing, analysing, and sharing whole-slide images in the cloud at petabyte scale. Pathology provides one of the most detailed and direct profiles of diseases like cancer, informing up to 70% of clinical decisions. Proscia’s Concentriq, delivered as a software-as-a-Service on AWS, maximises
the value of this data by combining proven workflows, interoperability, and native AI with enterprise-grade security, storage optimisation, and elastic scalability for cost- effective performance at scale. Concentriq now supports AWS HealthImaging, delivering critical benefits for customers managing whole-slide image data. Customers can quickly access whole- slide images from the cloud with sub- second time-to-first-image, enabling high-throughput workflows. With AWS HealthImaging’s purpose-built DICOM- native storage and DICOMweb APIs, Concentriq delivers vendor-neutral data management, this standardisation brings pathology together with radiology and other imaging modalities, reducing IT overhead. Also through Concentriq, pathology data stored in AWS HealthImaging is seamlessly accessible for AI development and readily usable by AI applications.
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