Abstract:

Biomedical Laboratory Scientists (BMS) work in the field of biomedical laboratory services, mainly in the health sector, and are responsible for diagnosing and monitoring of diseases. In order to provide first class clinical laboratory services it is inevitable for BMS to participate in continuing professional development (CPD) programmes. CPD should best be implemented in national educational programmes in a mandatory fashion, thus giving professionals the possibility to keep up with new technologies and the latest scientific outcomes in order to provide best practice for patient safety. Whereas education has recently been harmonized throughout Europe as a result of the Bologna Process, CPD is not regulated in every country and varies from well-organised and obligatory to voluntary or non-existing. Our partnership, with a wide geographic spread over Europe, consider lifelong learning and mandatory CPD programmes as vital for the professionals. We intend to initiate a start-up project for coordinating CPD throughout Europe by means of a questionnaire about already existing CPD programmes and their accreditation. A main objective of our partnership is to update and reform an existing European Professional Dossier in order to make it digitally available. Our goal is to produce a first draft of European guidelines for CPD to be presented on a National level which should build a road to a European credit system for Continuing Professional Development of biomedical laboratory scientists throughout European laboratories, similar or identical to the ECVET or ECTS system, in order to allow the biomedical laboratory scientist to move from one learning context to another, in order to achieve lifelong learning.

Keywords:

Biomedical Laboratory Scientist, BMS, Continuing Professional Development, CPD, European Digital Dossier.