ISBT Standing Committee of the ISBT Academy
Chairperson and committee
Chairperson: Jill Storry (Sweden)
Vice-Chairperson: Cynthia So-Osman (The Netherlands)
Members:
Lani Lieberman (Canada)
Ratti Ram Sharma (India)
Sophie Uyoga (Kenya)
Sally Lam (Malaysia)
Clotilde Carsolio Estrada (Mexico)
Dina Ekram (Egypt)
Brigitte Flesch (Germany)
The Academy Standing Committee is supported by Caroline Hochheuser, Eszter Herczenik and Jenny White (ISBT Academy Support, Scientific Officer, and Executive Director respectively), and works closely with ISBT Secretary General Gwen Clarke, ISBT Scientific Secretary Jason Ackers, and Chair of the ISBT Foundation, Ravi Reddy.
Meetings and Teleconferences
The SCA met at the ISBT meeting in Barcelona in June, 2024 and virtually in February 2025. The chairs, Jill Storry and Cynthia So-Osman, held a one-day business meeting with ISBT colleagues at the ISBT office in November 2024 to discuss the future of the Education Program Steering Committee, to review the SCA terms of reference and other matters.
Activities during the period
Financial Support for educational events (April 2024 – March 2024)
Approved applications
23 applications for a total of €148,240 were approved from the applications submitted to meet the April 1st and October 1st deadlines. These included application from Albania, Cameroon, Colombia, Congo, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, India (x3), Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan (x3), Paraguay, Tanzania. Applications from Australia, The Netherlands and South Africa were approved funding to support the attendance of delegates from low and middle-income countries to their conferences.
Reports from the events supported by Academy funding have been published in Transfusion Today as and when they are received. A total of 23 reports were published during this reporting period.
10 applications were declined after careful review by the SCA, and one application was withdrawn by the applicant.
Applications to use ISBT logo (April 2024-March 2025)
Three applications were received and approved.
ISBT Highlight Days (April 2024-March 2025)
One application was approved (€8,256)
Academy Day
Barcelona (June 2024) The Academy Day at the international ISBT meeting held in Barcelona was very well-attended and covered a broad range of topics that was designed to have something for every attendee: Blood Banking during Natural Disasters, Controversies in Prenatal Serological Testing, Donors & donations, Update on Immunohematology, Granulocytes disorders, diagnosis and transfusion therapy, Blood Service Finance 101, Social media in Transfusion Medicine, and Career possibilities in Transfusion Medicine.
Milan (June 2025) An exciting Academy has been planned for the upcoming meeting in Milan.
Education Project Standing Committee (EPSC)
The EPSC was a subcommittee of the ISBT Academy and worked specifically on developing educational content and projects. The primary focus was the development of courses based on a very popular textbook, colloquially known as Beryl’s book (Armstrong BC, Wilkinson R and Goldman M. Introduction to Blood Transfusion: From Donor to Recipient. ISBT Science Series 2020;15.Special Issue). The EPSC identified needs based on the downloads of individual chapters, and employed the talents of Dr. Geoff Simon to create the course material. A total of five EBAH-accredited courses are currently available for on-line learning:
- Course 1: Introduction to antigen-antibody reactions
- Course 2: Antigen-antibody reactions in the laboratory
- Course 3: The use of cells and antibodies as reagents
- Course 4: Antigen and antibody variation and antihuman globulin
- Course 5: Antiglobulin tests
These courses continue to be popular and the subject matter is such that they remain a current and reliable source of basic technical training. However, the remaining chapters of Beryl’s Book do not lend themselves well to the current eLearning model. In 2023, the educational strategy slightly shifted from long courses to short case studies modules, as these shorter modules can be better integrated into WP training etc. A case study from the Immunohaematology Working Party was very successfully adapted to an eLearning module by Geoff and the EPSC (Jill Storry, Sandra Nance, Lilian Castilho) and presented in Cape Town. Given the breadth of expertise of the SCA, and the in-house expertise at the ISBT office, it was concluded that we would like to continue with developing shorter case studies but that we no longer saw a role for the EPSC. Therefore a proposal was made to, and passed by the ISBT board at the December 2024 meeting in December 2024, to disband the EPSC and invite the expertise of the willing committee members to the SCA.
Other matters
Expansion of the SCA Officially, the highly successful I TRY IT programme belongs to the Academy but in practice, the programme is autonomous and quite separate from the other Academy activities, which has made it difficult for the SCA to understand their needs. Similarly, the ISBT’s recently launched ISBT Mentorship platform is also under the wing of the SCA. The ISBT board accepted the proposal that the coordinators of both programmes be formal members of the SCA. The SCA terms of reference have been updated to include these changes.
