Pathology IT: The Case for a Recognised NHS DDaT Workforce Specialism

Automated laboratory analyser within pathology laboratory

In March 2026, NHS England announced a new requirement for professional membership in partnership with the Federation for Informatics Professionals (FEDIP), the British Computer Society (BCS) and further professional bodies for the digital, data and technology (DDaT) workforce.

Digital roles are integral to the delivery of care, and the NHS digital workforce deserve the professional identity and structured development.

Over the years there has been increasing focus on developing digital maturity from a technological perspective. This registration and recognition are the equivalent professional maturity to the NHS DDaT workforce.

The FEDIP Occupational Architecture sets out DDaT ‘job families’ and the newly formalised additions such as Digital Leadership roles, Cyber Security and Clinical Informatics. It includes roles such as Chief Pharmacy Information Officer, which represents meaningful progress in recognising digital healthcare roles that require specialist leadership and professional identity. The inclusion of a Chief Pharmacy Information Officer role among the leadership role definitions is important as it formally acknowledges that pharmacy informatics requires niche technical leadership and is not simply generic IT applied to the pharmacy discipline.

What it does not include is a named Pathology IT family, a defined Pathology IT leadership position or career pathway. As healthcare recognises distinct clinical specialties, we are in a position where the healthcare IT profession should likewise recognise and structure around specialist digital domains rather than subsuming them into generic roles.

Pathology IT: Masters of all Trades

Pathology IT professionals are a highly specialist, unique, cross-disciplinary resource. Their hybrid role sits between laboratory medicine and computer science. Combining technical system management, integration, troubleshooting, service support, compliance documentation, reporting, stakeholder liaison, hardware and software specialists. Pathology IT ensures systems and hardware remain aligned with laboratory operations, clinical requirements and accreditation standards. Often these roles are categorised under IT systems support and perceived as helpdesk IT for those outside of pathology. Pathology IT is not routine technical support; it is specialist operational infrastructure for diagnostics, enabling the entire flow of diagnostic information that clinicians, hospitals and patients rely on every day.

Pathology services depend on the Pathology IT capability, including but not limited to the below.

Manage the pathology IT estate: hardware and software
Administer and support across multiple hospitals; LIMS, integration engine, reporting systems, analysers, middleware, printers, barcode devices, PCs, scanners, digital dictation, blood tracking and digital pathology devices.
Build and maintain laboratory system; rules, configuration, user access, reference data, test codes, analyser and integration mappings.
Work with operational and clinical teams, analyse service and user requirements then translate them into system configuration.
Issue management and resolution
Investigate and resolve complex integration, analyser and configuration issues.
Own escalations for ongoing service-impacting incidents, liaising with third-parties where required.
Change management and regulatory compliance
Oversee the safe implementation of software and hardware upgrades. Validate orders and results integration between the OCS, EPR, LIMS, and downstream systems.
Scope, log and present changes through CAB processes.
Gather evidence and complete documentation to support accreditation to relevant standards (UKAS, MHRA, information governance)
Specialist advice, reporting and service improvement
Advise clinicians, scientists, managers and external stakeholders on complex pathology IT issues.
Maintain communication with external organisations including primary care, community services, ICBs and suppliers.
Extract, analyse and present data from pathology and quality management systems, including management, performance and financial reporting.
Identify opportunities to improve workflows, efficiency and digital practice across pathology.

Pathology and Pathology IT

The Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath) has long described pathology as contributing to around 70% of diagnoses in the NHS with approximately 95% of clinical pathways reliant on access to pathology services and estimated over 1 billion pathology tests processed in England. This highlights how central laboratory medicine is to all aspects of healthcare. Disruption or shutdown of vital pathology services would constitute a serious patient safety incident and could, in extreme cases, necessitate partial or full hospital service closure. Pathology services are critically dependent on Pathology IT and the systems they manage; the resilience and integrity of these systems are essential to the safe operation of hospital services.

As per the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) slogan, Pathology is “at the heart of healthcare”. Think of your business continuity, if A&E becomes unavailable, how does this affect the other hospital departments? What if you can no longer provide any pathology services? How long can hospital services run without laboratory tests?

Pathology is fundamental to the health service, therefore, the digital capability that pathology relies on is fundamental also. Pathology IT under-recognition is not harmless.

Pathology IT is not IT support

Pathology IT combines specialist laboratory and technical knowledge in a way that most generic role families do not capture well. If Pathology IT is not visible as a specialist arm, it is more likely to be absorbed into broad digital or operational categories that do not reflect the real complexity of the work. This can weaken job design, blur accountability and make it harder for senior leadership to identify fragility or capability gaps within specialist digital teams.

FEDIP’s own explanation for the need for the Occupational Architecture points out a historical landscape of inconsistent titles, descriptions and pay bandings. This creates challenges in recruitment, progression and talent attraction, which becomes a strategic problem in Pathology IT.

Pathology IT roles are difficult to recruit due to rare skill set requirements. The role requires professionals with an understanding of laboratory science and computing, hardware and software, workflow and architecture, operational service delivery and system change. Those combinations are difficult to find and are even harder to replace once lost.

Without a defined career path or a named specialty to aspire to, it is difficult to attract new talent into the discipline. A talented and ambitious biomedical scientist with an interest in computing might not realise there is a viable career in Pathology IT. These roles are not highlighted in mainstream digital career frameworks.

Many Pathology IT experts developed organically. These experts may be a laboratory scientist who was assigned a project to improve lab processes, or an IT engineer who learned about lab workflows on the job.

These individuals often become indispensable lynchpins in their organisations. However, when they retire or move on this leaves a skills gap that is difficult to fill. This can make services fragile.

The private sector often offers better pay, clearer recognition and stronger role identity. Some software companies actively recruiting experienced NHS pathology IT personnel, due to their developed unique skillset and rare cross-disciplinary expertise. Without formal recognition inside DDaT Occupational Architecture, pathology services are at risk relying on a limited source of these uniquely skilled individuals without creating a sustainable pipeline behind them.

We need a recognised specialist arm within the DDaT occupational structure with clear roles and responsibilities including practitioner roles, senior specialist roles and leadership roles, all clearly identifiable as Pathology IT rather than mapped into generic families. This recognised specialism would support better recruitment, more consistent development, clearer progression and more realistic workforce planning.

As digital healthcare continues to evolve, the specialist workforce model must evolve with it. NHS organisations are relying ever more on digital capabilities embedded within clinical services. Where those capabilities are mature and visible, they can be developed properly.

Pathology IT has reached the point where it would benefit from explicit recognition. Pathology IT is a core healthcare informatics discipline that is indispensable to patient care and should not remain a silent partner in the digital revolution.

Elevating Pathology IT

To truly fulfil the spirit of the 2026 professionalisation drive, we should ensure no major digital domain is left unrecognised. Pathology IT merits the same explicit attention that pharmacy has begun to receive.