What is a Healthcare Scientist?
Healthcare scientists play a vital role in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a huge number of medical conditions, as well as in rehabilitation. Along with doctors, nurses and other professions, healthcare scientists are essential members of today's healthcare team. More than 80% of clinical decisions, spanning all stages of clinical pathways from prevention and well-being through to end of life care, involve the work of healthcare scientists. This contribution is vital to safe and effective care, to achieving an accurate and timely diagnosis and to monitoring the response to a range of therapeutic interventions. Whether it's preparing an operating room for transplant surgery, analysing tissue samples, or researching how results from the human genome project can be translated into new treatments ... these jobs are done by people whose expertise helps to save lives and improve care for millions of NHS users. Rapid advances in technology mean this is now one of the most exciting, challenging and rewarding areas of the NHS.
Healthcare scientists work in one of three broad divisions, which encompass over 50 different scientific disciplines, as shown in the table below.
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Life Sciences
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Physiological Sciences
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Physical Sciences and Engineering
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- Analytical toxicology
- Anatomical pathology
- Blood transfusion science/transplantation
- Clinical biochemistry
- Clinical cytogenetics
- Clinical embryology and andrology
- Clinical immunology
- Cytopathology
- Electron microscopy
- Haemotology
- Haemostasis and thrombosis histocompatibility & immunogenetics
- Histopathology
- Molecular genetics
- Microbiology
- Paediatric metabolic biochemistry
- Phlebotomy
- Tissue banking
- Virology
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- Audiology
- Autonomic neurovascular function
- Cardiac physiology
- Clinical perfusion
- Critical care technology
- Gastrointestinal physiology
- Hearing therapy
- Neurophysiology
- Opthalmology
- Respiratory physiology
- Sleep physiology
- Urodynamics and urological measurements
- Vascular technology
- Vision science
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- Biomechanical engineering
- Clinical measurement
- Equipment management and clinical engineering
- Medical electronics and instrumentation
- Medical engineering design
- Rehabilitation engineering
- Diagnostic radiology
- Magnetic resonance imaging
- Nuclear medicine
- Radiopharmacy
- Radiation protection and monitoring
- Radiotherapy physics
- Renal dialysis technology
- Non-ionising radiation
- Medical illustration and clinical photography
- Maxillofacial prosthetics and reconstruction
- Ultrasound
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Careers in Healthcare Science
For further information on careers in healthcare science, please follow this link to the NHS Careers website.
For further information on Clinical Scientist training posts, please visit http://www.nhsclinicalscientists.info
Information about becoming a Healthcare Science Ambassador can be found here
Useful Links
Federation for Healthcare Science website
Skills for Health
Health Professions Council
Institute of Biomedical Scientists
Association of Clinical Scientists
