Long time no post! You might have seen over on my Instagram that things have been a little rough the past few months. Understaffing and overworking has really made me struggle to sit down and concentrate on writing these longer blog pieces, but I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things and get more thoughts down.
Starting with Healthcare Science week! Healthcare science is a huge area of scientists, researchers, technologists and more, whose work is extremely important to treatment development and patient outcome. In the NHS, there are over 50,000 healthcare scientists, and we are involved in 80% of clinical pathways leading to patient outcomes. We are the scientific backbone of the NHS, yet most people don’t know that we exist, and it’s rare that the public gets a chance to have a peek into the roles we inhabit.
You might think that healthcare science is restricted to a life looking down a microscope, and that we are in these roles as we don’t like patients, but that is so completely not true. Everything we do is done with the patient in mind, and even if we don’t always interact with the patient, we have a huge impact on them.
With regards to job roles, there’s actually a huge variety of careers in healthcare science (yes, some involving looking down a microscope). In the NHS these can be categorised into the following four broad groups: laboratory (pathology) sciences, physiological sciences, medical physics and clinical engineering, and bioinformatics. Within these there’s a multitude of roles at different grading levels, with different entry requirements and day to day tasks. Some are more lab based, others patient facing, and some can be neither!
There are numerous routes into healthcare science, ranging from requiring years of study required to none at all, for example:
- Only GCSE’s needed for medical laboratory assistant and phelbotomist roles
- Institute of Biomedical Science portfolio and accredited degree needed for being a biomedical scientist
- NHS Practitioner Training Programme
- Apprenticeships at levels 2 and 4 for healthcare science assistants and associates
- Graduate-entry NHS Scientist Training Programme
- Higher Specialist training
- Part time degrees
Sought after skills in these areas include organisation, flexibility, attention to detail, empathy, technical skills, communication and the ability to follow protocols. More information about different careers in healthcare science, the qualifications needed and how to apply can be found here.
It is not just the NHS that contains healthcare scientists, academia, industry and private hospitals also have roles in this wide discipline. Whether it’s developing technology to assist with rehabilitation, or researching how to improve patient cancer outcomes, this industry encompasses a vast amount of skills and knowledge broaching the world of science and the world of healthcare.
People working in this industry do so for a number of reasons (and I’d fully recommend listening to the podcast The Pathology Grand Tour to hear just some of them), and personally I joined this industry because I loved science and I wanted to help people. For these two reasons, throughout school I was only presented with the option of being a doctor as a career choice, I didn’t know any other careers existed for someone like me, and it seemed that no-one I knew did either. I accepted medical school offers but didn’t make the grades, instead going through Clearing to study Biomedical Sciences, and absolutely fell in love with the course, being in lab, and doing research.
Now, I’m an associate practitioner working in a histopathology lab in the NHS, working directly with patient samples and playing a part in their road to diagnosis. I want to spread awareness of other scientific careers, and also want to shout about the hospital staff doing amazing work, past doctors and nurses who may be more well known.
Although patients may not know we exist, it is no doubt that without healthcare scientists, patients would simply not get the treatment they need.
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