About
The Julia Garnham Centre is a unique remote placements facility, created to help reduce NHS cancer backlogs, whilst training the next generation of leaders in the field of genetics.
About the centre
The Julia Garnham Centre was established in 2021, allowing us to offer remote NHS work placements to undergraduate and postgraduate students within the School of Biosciences.
The centre exists to support the NHS in dealing with cancer and rare diseases backlogs and to train the next generation of bioscientists to continue this vital work.
Our remote NHS work placements provide students with clinical training and analytical projects that help to reduce both cancer backlogs and the reporting times of patients, improving patient outcomes and leading to lives being saved, locally and nationally. We’re doing this by working with the Sheffield Diagnostic Genetics Service (SDGS) at the Sheffield Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. This partnership allows us to train our students to use sophisticated NHS diagnostic services to pre-screen backlogs for markers of rapid disease progression, as these individuals are more likely to suffer adverse outcomes whilst waiting for diagnostic results.
Our placements have been carefully designed to protect patients and their identities, and are supervised by NHS staff from the Sheffield Children's.
The centre is named after Julia Garnham who was a Geneticist for the Sheffield Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust for over 30 years.
Our facility
Our NHS genomics facility is based in the School of Biosciences (Firth Court Building) which allows us to offer training and placement opportunities to undergraduates in their third year of study, and postgraduate students from the School of Biosciences. Training and placement opportunities are available across all courses in the School of Biosciences, subject to compliance with our data sharing agreements with the Sheffield Children's.
Training
The JGC provides our students with clinical genomic training, which complements their understanding and previous experience of genetics, to support NHS specialist services and deliver life saving impact. Our placements are scheduled flexibly around other academic commitments, allowing students to conduct their placements on campus around other academic commitments. Within the JGC you will have opportunities to work in a team and individually on live patient cases whilst being closely supervised by expert clinical genomic staff. Our training and placements are also supplemented with regular seminars, lectures and workshops to help develop your expertise in the field of genomic diagnostics.
Our history
The Julia Garnham Centre evolved from a long-standing partnership with the Sheffield Children’s, which provided unique learning opportunities and enhanced employability to students through hospital-based clinical work placements. The placements were underpinned by NHS training procedures that were embedded within one of our postgraduate courses. This provided students with the skills and knowledge to support the analytical evaluation of live patient samples referred for oncology investigations.
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in large increases to NHS patient backlogs across the UK. Increased cancer backlogs are a major concern, and these are likely to worsen in the future. This made us re-think our existing model in order to work out how we could help.
The classification of cancer requires a multidisciplinary approach between oncologists and laboratory experts across the pathology sector. Genetic analysis is part of this and provides vitally important tools in this context - as the information contributes to very reliable indicators of cancer and patient status, and is central to highly effective rational and targeted treatments, and detection of remissions, relapses, and metastases. The timely reporting of such observations is therefore mission-critical for the NHS to ensure optimal patient outcomes.
In response to the pandemic, the placements were re-designed to run remotely from the School of Biosciences to improve access for students, address capacity issues and solve Covid-19 related hospital attendance restrictions.
Since 2016, these hospital-based and virtual work placements have led to many students securing genetics jobs in the NHS. We also have a strong track record of our students progressing to the NHS flagship Scientist Training Programmes in Genomics and Cancer Genomics. We aim to make Sheffield the home of clinical genetics in the UK, training the next generation of leaders in this field.
Student placements
Sheffield Diagnostic Genetic Service (SDGS) has collaborated with the University of Sheffield to establish the Julia Garnham Centre (JGC). This is a unique remote placements facility located in the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield.
Named after long-term former SDGS staff member, this placement centre provides students with essential experience and training in genetic analysis and upskills the next generation of genomic scientists and technologists. The students are then welcomed to a placement with SDGS to prepare cases (currently focussing on karyotyping of bone marrow samples from haemato-oncology referrals), making them ready for NHS Healthcare Scientists to analyse, and thereby releasing staff time and helping to manage backlogs. For further information please contact Duncan.Baker@nhs.net.