While there is much of interest going on in the external environment about topics such as health care reform and funding, the everyday job for many managers is about coping with internal matters. So this session of TBOP, entitled the Mean, Lean and Green laboratory, is aiming at seeing what’s new in laboratory management.

We are constantly told that an organisation’s most important resource is its people yet a cynic might say what can possibly be said that’s new about managing people? It is axiomatic that a happy employee is an industrious one but the task of achieving that is a challenging one. Most managers might be more focused on just keeping staff given the shortages that are starting to appear. Part and parcel of that retention is succession planning and developing future leaders. 

All of these tasks are far from easy and the first two speakers will provide quite different perspectives. Larry Siedlick comes from a career of managing several pathology laboratories in the US and will provide some insight into how his behavior as a leader has led to producing “high performance staff”. Cheryl McKinna comes from working in just about every environment apart from laboratories! These include backgrounds in criminology, sport, business and health. Her perspective of people management will come through talking about “Xcel^r8 – the business of caring”, her management course which Cheryl runs for Canterbury District Health Board in New Zealand.

The Xcel^r8 course has a significant component devoted to Lean thinking which provides a suitable entree to our next two speakers.  At the last TBOP we devoted a whole day to Lean which proved popular but a point of discussion at that time was whether this was just another management fad or something which would become incorporated into lab management. To see what has happened on the Lean front since then, we have invited back Leanne Ballard and Ken Worth to tell us whether they have remained on the lean road and if so what have they achieved.

Our third topic in this session addresses where the green movement is in regard to laboratories. Do we have to take this more seriously than recycling paper and having green rubbish bins? Will the diagnostic vendors be providing us with energy ratings or the carbon footprints of their power hungry or thirsty instruments? Greg Jewson will be telling us we have to get serious because environmental issues are encompassed in new versions of ISO Guidelines and presumably these will have relevance to laboratories. One laboratory which clearly has embarked on the green path and would appear to be far advanced compared to the rest of us is ARUP laboratories in the United States. David Jackson will be here to tell us about his and his colleagues’ environmental journey.