Case studies: Pre-registration clinical scientist: Eskinder

Eskinder works in the medical engineering and physics department of a hospital in London...

I work at the King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust as a clinical scientist. The hospital is one of London's largest and busiest teaching hospitals and plays a key role in the training and education of medical, nursing and dental students.

My main duties are split between working on initiatives to support trust-wide medical device management, as well as research and development activities. This includes risk and safety technical consultative work as well as specifying and commissioning of new equipment. I also work with clinicians and other scientist to provide technological solutions to medical problems and, in some cases, develop new medical devices.

I studied maths, physics, biology and chemistry at A-level. During my final year, my then physics teacher (who was also my tutor) recommended I explore what has become my current field - medical engineering. I have always been fascinated by how the body works, so in choosing a career, I looked for one that combined my interests of medicine and my strengths of maths and the physical sciences. I went on to study biomedical engineering with applied physics at university.

Medical engineering and physics is a huge field. The philosophy of my degree was to give a broad overview of the whole field as well as good grounding of engineering fundamentals. At the end of the degree, students were aware of the basic science underpinning each sub-modality of medical physics and engineering as well as general skills of research and communication developed from report writing and presentations both working as an individual and in teams.

At the end of my penultimate year, I did a one-month work placement at the electromedical engineering department of my local hospital. After graduation, I started out on the clinical scientist graduate training scheme. This entailed studying an MSc in Medical Engineering and Physics full time for the first year, then carrying out three- or four-month work placements in specific areas within medical engineering and physics. Following the completion of the first part, I secured my current post as a pre-registration clinical scientist. I will be able to apply for registration after two years.

It's difficult to describe a typical day as there is very little that is routine about my role. I may be involved in the commissioning of a theatre endoscopy system one day, give a lecture to BSc Physics students the next and write a program that recognises when a patient is snoring and sends output to a muscle stimulator the day after that.

The skills and qualities needed for this role are, in my opinion, good organisation, flexibility, a genuine love for science and keenness to continually learn. Many of the projects I work on are quite novel and require me to learn new techniques - be it programming or scientific concepts. Being a geek, I enjoy this a lot, and am continually broadening my skill portfolio.

What I find most rewarding about my job is that it feels that, directly or indirectly, I contribute to improving patient safety and the standard of clinical care they receive. As discussed above, I also enjoy the variety, the emphasis on continual professional development and the support provided to do so.

In the future I hope to become a state registered clinical scientist. I then hope to do a PhD and work my way up to consultant status. I have also just started a year-long management course and would like to move to frontline management at some point.

If I was to offer advice to anyone interested in pursuing a career in the field of biomedical engineering, I would suggest three things. Do as well as you can possibly do at A-levels and university. Competition in this field is quite high, and it really pays to skip on a few student nights out every so often. Secondly, get as much work experience as you possibly can while at university. Finally, see your university careers adviser to get help with application processes and have a mock interview if possible.