Ancha Joof, IBMS Events and Engagement Officer, outlines the steps that hospital laboratories need to take to organise and run Harvey’s Gang tours.
If you are looking to take part in Harvey’s Gang laboratory tours, as a new or existing site, there are some new things that you need to know. If you are a new site – whether you’ve never run a tour before or where all previous tours were run by someone who has since left your organisation – you will need to fill in our registration form. This can be found on our website at www.harveysgang.com. Upon completion, we will send you our welcome pack with details on how to organise and run the tours.
All organisations, whether you are running Harvey’s Gang tours already, just starting out or restarting them, will be required to sign up to our terms and conditions. This acts as a contract and ensures that we can work together to help you organise and promote the tours to young patients.
By signing the contract, you can also help us to freely use photos of patients across our website and social media channels, to promote their stories and lived experiences. This will also make it easier for us to reach a wider audience as we aim to provide more young patients across the UK access to a laboratory tour, empowering them to better understand their healthcare and the many biomedical science staff that are a part of it.
Once signed, we can send you the resources you need for the tours, including lab coats, goody bags and other materials for patients who take part in the tours. This also includes a template for a risk assessment for you to use for comparison when making one for your laboratory. There will also be an application form for the parents and carers of patients, to provide helpful information on patients’ conditions, when they are able to attend the tour and their lab coat size.
When you have identified your Harvey’s Gang “Junior Trainee Biomedical Scientist” to join you for the tour, we recommend that you inform your trust’s communications team to come and take some photos, for promotion via social media and newsletters. Our news proforma and press release template can then be used to promote the tour to your local newspaper and you can also share this with us for our website and social media channels.
As we look to build upon the amazing work of Malcolm Robinson, which has led to Harvey’s Gang tours taking place in over 140 sites so far, you can expect to see exciting new ideas from us. This will include a tie-in with our hugely popular Superlab comics. But we are also open to feedback on ways that we can improve the initiative and ensure that more tours can take place. If you would like to contact us with your suggestions, or you need further information about Harvey’s Gang, we have a new email address for you to contact us on – [email protected].