Higher Biomedical Support Worker - Histopathology

Job overview

A post is available in the Histopathology Department. This represents an exciting opportunity to be part of an excellent team working in a busy modern teaching hospital laboratory. The department has a workload of around 80,000 surgical requests per year and covers a wide range of routine and specialised services.

This is an excellent opportunity to work within a committed team of office, laboratory and Consultant Pathologist staff. The department encourages active professional development and further educational activities. The service is also currently developing digital pathology reporting, and is progressing towards full digital reporting. We also use CEREBRO specimen tracking system. The service processes a wide variety of patient samples taken from hospital patients and from GP surgeries in the area. Histopathology reports provide diagnostic and prognostic information to support patient care and treatment and plays a key part in the cancer diagnostic pathway.

Full time post - 37.5hrs and part time post - 22.5hrs per week

Main duties of the job

The post holder will work in all areas of the lab and will carry out support tasks and technical duties including section cutting, tissue embedding and use specialist laboratory equipment. You will develop skills to enable you to make decisions about section cutting quality and depth and correct orientation of samples when embedding.

You will be able to develop your technical skills and experience in all three specialist areas of the lab and will be involved with training and mentoring Biomedical Support Worker staff. You will also develop communication and training skills.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To assist the Senior BMS in supervising the BMSWs in specimen reception and cut-up, main laboratory, immunohistochemistry and digital scanning areas on rotation.
• To train and mentor BMSWs with the assistance of the Training Team.
• To use the laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and other Trust IT platforms.
• To regularly make up and replace hazardous and toxic chemicals, as required. Lifting of chemical containers up to 10l for storage and disposal is also required on a daily basis.
• To assist in solving day-to-day problems, including incorrectly labelled specimens and follow appropriate quality and error logging procedures in the event of an incident.
• To receive and check specimens of human organs and tissue specimens with the request forms and to ensure correct patient ID on both matching request forms and specimen pots. To give specimens and forms a unique laboratory number and transfer patient information to the LIMS.
• To regularly handle fixed and fresh tissue. This includes working with recognisable body parts, fetal tissue, post-mortem tissue and potentially infectious material in accordance with departmental policies, which may cause distress.
• To assist pathologists and BMS staff with dissection. To include the handling and disposal of sharp blades and to clean working areas of tissue, faeces, mucus and blood.
• To carry out routine wax block embedding of surgical specimens, and section cutting of surgical and large biopsy cases.
• To assist in the staining, coverslipping and sorting of slides.

Please refer to the Job Description for the full specification of responsibilities and requirements for this post.