Healthcare Scientist

When you’re ill and you need a doctor to help work out what’s wrong, you don’t see the army of Healthcare Scientists in the hospital who keep everything running! Would you believe that there are over 50,000 Healthcare Scientists in England alone? Healthcare Scientists work with the doctors and nurses to help with your diagnosis and treatment plan (working out what’s wrong and how to fix it). This might mean running samples such as when you have a swab of a sore throat and they need to work out what bug you have, through to an ECG which monitors your heart, an EEG which monitors your brain, scans of your body or even looking at cells to work out what type of cancer you could have. Without them, you would not know which medicine might make you better. There are lots of different types of healthcare scientists but for all of them, you might need to be good at problem solving, communication and caring.