‘Healthcare Science Week’ may have just ended, but the discussion of careers in this area will continue. That’s in part because the UK’s Department of Health introduced a new framework in Februrary to modernize career pathways and training for those entering or already within the field of healthcare science.
In Britain, healthcare scientists work within a range of approximately 50 disciplines in the life sciences, physiological sciences and clinical engineering and physical sciences. These scientists work primarily toward providing expert diagnostic advice and therapy for patient care and prevention of disease. A healthcare scientist in the UK can vary from being a hospital pharmacist to being a clinical geneticist or a cardiographer.
A 2009 analysis produced for the government by the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute concluded that current pathways and training for healthcare scientists within the National Health Service (NHS) were “overly complex.” Health organizations and individuals who were questioned as part of the consultation also stated that a stronger emphasis on research and development within healthcare science is needed, but there was hope put forth in the analysis that a new framework would help “reinvigorate” this area. Such a reinvention of the field “calls for links with industry and between hospital and research laboratories, and for any HCS [healthcare scientist’s] qualifications to have ‘currency’ outside the NHS,” concluded the 2009 consultation.
Beyond simplifying career pathways, the new proposals in the framework, titled ‘Modernising Scientific Careers: The UK Way Forward’, aim to ensure that healthcare scientists in the UK are kept up to date with ever-changing science and technological advances.
UK Health Minister Ann Keen stated in a press release that “it is so important that we change conventional views of scientists locked away in hospital laboratories to one that is more current. More and more healthcare scientists regularly engage face to face with patients as well as aiding doctors in up to 80% of all clinical diagnosis.”
Posted on behalf of Nayanah Siva, London