Dr Anne Morrison: A career built on expertise and curiosity

A consultant’s perspective on the value and impact of the Technical Assessor (TA) role

For more than two decades, Dr Anne Morrison has brought her extensive clinical and laboratory expertise to the accreditation community, first through Clinical Pathology Accreditation (CPA) and later through UKAS. As she retires from her role as a Technical Assessor (TA) at the end of 2025, her reflections offer valuable insight into the purpose and impact of the TA role – and why experienced healthcare consultants are so well placed to take it on.

Anne’s career has been rooted in haematology and blood transfusion. As a consultant haematologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow, she developed special interests in lymphoma and transfusion medicine. But it was her early encounters with CPA assessments that first sparked her interest in becoming an assessor.

“I always found it difficult to fully understand how the laboratory should prepare for a CPA assessment… I wanted to find out more about how assessments worked, and that’s what led me into becoming an assessor.”

Bringing real-world expertise into the assessment team

Anne describes the TA as the person who brings discipline-specific, real-world knowledge into the assessment process. Assessment Managers focus on the application of the standard itself, while TAs ensure that technical activities are reliable, safe and aligned with recognised good practice.

“The Technical Assessor brings their knowledge and skill to looking at processes within the laboratory – to see that they are running appropriately, producing the right results and providing a good service to users.”

She emphasises that this relies on understanding how a discipline works “in the real world” – including pressures, resource constraints and the range of acceptable approaches to meeting requirements. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Different laboratories may do things differently, and neither way is necessarily wrong.”

This balanced, practical judgement is exactly why TAs are so important. Their insight helps ensure that assessments consider more than what works on paper; they help evaluate what works in practice.

Learning from others – and strengthening services

One of the most rewarding aspects of the role, Anne says, has been the opportunity to learn from other laboratories.

“I’m a very nosy individual… I like the chance to poke around other people’s laboratories and ask them questions.”

But there is a deeper value to this curiosity. Seeing a wide range of laboratories – large and small, specialist and generalist – helped her bring ideas back to her own service.

“I’d always take examples of good practice back to my own lab… Cross-pollination between laboratories was very useful.”

She recalls a particularly striking example of accreditation in action: a laboratory that identified an issue through an external quality assurance (EQA) scheme and undertook a comprehensive review of all affected results, contacting clinicians and patients where necessary.

“That was a really good example of using your quality system to maintain the quality of results… and to make widely known what needed to be done.”

Supporting laboratories through challenge and change

The role has not been without its challenges – particularly when supporting laboratories to strengthen medical staff engagement in quality systems.

In haematology, where many consultants balance clinical and laboratory duties, engagement with accreditation processes can be variable.

“It was sometimes difficult to get buy-in from consultants that this was important… Some would say, ‘Why do I have to demonstrate my competence? I passed my exams.’ But they may have been a while ago, and now you do have to show you’re still competent.”

Anne often acted as a bridge, helping laboratory teams and medical staff find common ground, improve understanding and meet the requirements of the standard.

Her experience highlights an important cultural shift: quality is no longer an administrative burden but a shared responsibility underpinning safe, consistent care.

Why consultants make excellent Technical Assessors

Anne is clear that becoming a TA enhanced her own professional practice.

“It supported the quality system in my own laboratory because I had an understanding of what was involved. I felt I could support the quality manager more than if I hadn’t had that background.”

She also points to the development of transferable skills, including communication, critical thinking and balanced judgement.

“It challenges you to keep your mind open and flexible… that there’s more than one way to get to the right answer safely.”

For consultants considering the role, she offers reassurance that the workload is manageable, even alongside clinical practice. During her working years, she typically undertook two or three assessments per year.

“You have to be willing to take on that little extra bit of work… but it’s interesting work.”

Encouraging others to get involved

Attracting new TAs – particularly those in clinical roles including medical consultants, consultant biomedical scientists and consultant clinical scientists – remains a challenge. Yet Anne hopes more consultants will consider contributing their expertise, whether early in their career or later on.

“For me, it was a really interesting way to transition from working full time in the NHS to something that gave me interest and challenge… It kept my mind ticking over.

To support consultants considering the role, there are several compelling reasons to take on Technical Assessor work alongside an existing clinical career:

• Enhance your own clinical governance practice – exposure to a wide range of laboratories strengthens understanding of quality systems and supports improvements within your own service.
• Broaden professional perspective – seeing how different laboratories operate offers valuable insights, helps challenge assumptions and encourages more flexible, open-minded approaches to problem-solving.
• Develop highly transferable skills – communication, critical enquiry, balanced judgement and the ability to assess evidence objectively all strengthen wider clinical and leadership practice.
• Make a direct contribution to patient safety – TAs play an important role in ensuring laboratory processes are safe, consistent and reliable, supporting high-quality care across the healthcare system.
• Shape the future of your discipline – by bringing frontline experience into assessments, consultants help maintain standards, share good practice and influence how services evolve.”

She believes the incentive for consultants is clear: they bring enormous value, learn a great deal in return, and play a vital role in upholding standards that directly support patient care.

“Professionally, it was very worthwhile. Personally, I felt like I got as much out of it as the laboratories being assessed.”

A final message

As Anne steps back from assessment, she leaves a simple message for her colleagues across the accreditation community:

“The vast majority of technical assessors I’ve worked with are extremely knowledgeable, hardworking and good at what they do… They’re providing a very important service.”

Her contribution exemplifies the impact of expertise, curiosity and a commitment to improving care. UKAS extends its sincere thanks to Anne for her service – and encourages other consultants to consider whether the Technical Assessor role could become part of their own professional journey.