I think healthcare science is a great career option because of how diverse and very dynamic
the field is. It offers you many different disciplines to go into and the constant research
means you're improving what you're doing for the patient all the time. You can go into
different areas of the hospital and you get more option, you get to meet more people as
well, so you get their insight and they teach you their experience as well as gaining your
own from situations you're put into. A big benefit of studying towards a degree in healthcare
science is you get to work in both outpatients and inpatients, so you get to be in surgery,
you get to see all the procedures done in surgery, so angiography, you get to see a
chest being opened, you get to see the heart, you get to see all the screens, and in both
you get the outpatients, so you get to do normal ECG's and all pacemaking, and it’s
really good. At placement I realised how much of what I learned is really being used, because
every day I was learning new things, making me more and more confident in all of the skills
I already had and developing new skills, and the patient contact is what I really enjoy
the most. Because of the nature of the course you get a lot more option, at the end of it
you can go into so many different areas of the hospital. You start off on a certain band
and you can work your way up the band to get more financially stable. Clinical engineering
in healthcare science stood out because it was different and not many places did it as
such, it was very new and exciting but there's other places you can go into. When I was searching
for a course through UCAS there was a huge number of universities that were providing
PTP style courses from up North to central London, where most of the uni's do actually
do this course and representative hospitals of those uni's do it as well. The training
does depend on which area you want to go into during your placement, so like here in renal
I learnt how to service haemodialysis machines and replace different areas of that, whereas
if you wanted to go into medical you'd probably be trained to fix incubators and things like
that, and eventually I want to be able to go in help out on the wards a lot more. A
degree in healthcare science helps me improve my science skills as you get to see all the
procedures in action, and this not only helps your science skills but also helps you people
skills. And I find it massively rewarding as well because I don't need to look at textbooks
all day to memorise all the science, I can just do it on placement remember it all and
apply it in my exams. Not only you get all the knowledge you're going to need, also at
the placement you really get involved in all the work and the everyday life of a lab and
you really feel like you're making a difference to someone's life by even the simplest thing
you help with. The training will make a huge difference to many people's lives as they
have congenital heart diseases which are straight from birth, and all the tests you do and all
the diagnostic changes you do to their pacemakers aids them throughout life and it helps them
lead a normal life even though they have an underlying heart problem. If you are thinking
about if you want to work in a hospital it’s not all to do with nurses and doctors, it's
like in high school when we were being told about careers, we got told, oh hospitals are
a good career aspect, but you think, oh I don't want to be a nurse or a doctor, so this
is one of the different areas of a hospital you can work with. So if you're thinking about
applying just go for it