CAREERS


has not yet begun to explore the messy, transformative moments through which practitioners internalise patient-centred values, with this specific theory–practice gap only recently identified.16


language of competence is carried back into academia as it atempts to address the gap.


The versatility of a biomedical science training is also its retention problem: every skill that makes a graduate a well-rounded professional makes them employable somewhere else.


moments that shaped them. For me, I remember a nightshift early in my career, as a lone practitioner providing blood for a toddler, who was bleeding profusely after having swallowed a buton batery and the less-than-ideal moment that the LIMS went down. I knew the blood needed to be out of the door as quickly as possible. I knew I needed to maintain a complete audit trail of the blood that had been issued. This was a moment where the regulatory theory I had learned collided with the reality of a bleeding patient. The solution: to run to the nearest office and put a handful of blood units on the photocopier. A stopgap that meant the audit trail was maintained without the time loss and transcription error risk of writing unit numbers down manually. Needless to say, the photocopier did not feature in any of the laboratory’s SOPs. It’s an example of the transition from following a series of prescribed steps to real-time problem solving amid competing pressures. As fellow biomedical scientist Shahnawaz Memon from Leeds Teaching Hospitals recently put it: “A lot of what new starters lack isn’t knowledge, it’s the sense of being the person that makes the decisions and owns them.” The concept of these messy work-


based transformative moments, that can only happen organically in the workplace, is explored in research on integrative pedagogy by Tynjälä, Häkkinen and Hämäläinen.12


of clinical training a biomedical scientist can expect, with the IBMS Registration Portfolio typically taking 6-12 months to complete. As Figure 1 shows, the issue here is not that biomedical scientists get less clinical training than other healthcare professionals; but that their practice-based learning is not interleaved with academic study in the same way. Opportunities for the dialogue that integrative pedagogy advocates are condensed and for those who complete their registration training after graduation, they are absent.12,13


The gap Anecdotally, lecturers of biomedical science will recognise the impact of the clinical placement on their students. Clara Wermelinger, biomedical scientist in haematology at Oxford University Teaching Hospitals, recently described professional identity formation to me as the journey from a student sheltered by education to someone who could see the bigger picture, and how their knowledge fited into a professional seting. That exposure to the world beyond their studies, they explained, sharpened their critical reasoning and produced direct, significant improvements in their final-year grades. There is some evidence to support this stance in the wider literature.14


This challenges the Their paper


explains that learning is most effective when theory and practice are in a continuous dialogue, so that time in the classroom sharpens time at the bench, and time at the bench sharpens time in the classroom. Looking at Table 1, the 1,000 hours of practice-based learning frequently mandated for comparator professions is roughly equivalent to six months of full-time practice-based learning. This is the minimum duration


common belief that professional identity forms downstream of theory; in reality, it develops at the intersection of theory and practice, with synergistic benefits for both. Yet this sits at odds with how the


profession is represented in the academic literature, where the practitioner’s voice is almost absent. Even the profession’s own atempts to name what graduates lack reach for employability skills, a vocabulary of competence, rather than the formation of professional identity.15


The literature 46 WWW.PATHOLOGYINPRACTICE.COM October 2026


The solution? Collectively these points establish the importance of understanding what professional identity means for biomedical scientists, how it develops currently and how this process can be purposefully and actively supported. Around 26% of graduates eligible to become biomedical scientists do so.7


While we can


acknowledge that this is a reflection of the versatility of IBMS-accredited course, the question remains, how can we support the development of the strong professional identity that would motivate eligible graduates to choose to become HCPC- registered biomedical scientists and to stay in the profession once they’re there? One suggestion might be to restructure


how biomedical scientists are trained. This was atempted and showed promise,17 but the education and training tariff that funds placements in other professions wasn’t made available to biomedical science students, so provision has largely disappeared.18


In this landscape,


a selling point of the clinical placement for employers is that placement students might stay long enough to contribute meaningfully to workloads.17 Another suggestion might be to target


courses more aggressively towards clinical practice. However, the same versatility of biomedical science degrees that might impact recruitment and retention in the profession is what has helped them to become one of the most strongly recruiting scientific degrees, ensuring we have a steady flow of eligible graduates. Additionally, the breadth of the curriculum is essential for practitioners. So, if we can’t emulate the structure of comparator professions, perhaps we can emulate another facet. As shown in Table 2, several of our


professional contemporaries have converged on a common potential solution; simulation. Could this work for biomedical science? So far, atempts to introduce simulation into the biomedical science curriculum have tended to replicate the technological focus of the current provision.19


Now we are presented with


an exciting opportunity to expand this solution into the sphere of professional identity formation. This would allow universities to support training officers by amplifying their voice and extending


Instead, the


Gemini Notebook


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