UHDB celebrates Healthcare Science Week 2024 and announces new HCS website hub
Monday 11 - Sunday 17 March is Healthcare Science Week 2024.
Healthcare scientists (HCS) are a highly diverse scientific workforce improving health and wellbeing of patients - a community of dedicated colleagues who make up around 5% of the entire NHS workforce, and help to inform and underpin around 80% of all diagnoses.
Healthcare science at UHDB falls into three broad and overlapping areas - Pathology Services, Physiological Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. However, healthcare scientists work in several fields beyond these three core areas.
Healthcare science is crucial, not only for care of our patients, but also to develop innovative tests and treatments for future care. Typically, HCS perform a number of both pre- and post-treatment tests to support the delivery of accurate diagnoses, therefore ensuring that our patients are given the best possible and most effective treatment for their condition.
For example, a healthcare scientist may conduct an antibody test to screen for the presence of antibodies in a patient's blood sample, which would indicate if a patient has been exposed to a particular virus or infection - helping in diagnosis and treatment planning. Alternatively, an another example would be a cholesterol test - which a healthcare scientist would conduct to measure the levels of various types of cholesterol in a patient's blood sample, assessing the patient's risk for developing heart disease and helping to guide treatment decisions.
As an organisation, we would like to take this opportunity to give thanks to our around 700 HCS colleagues for their invaluable contribution to the care we provide to our communities - who process millions of samples every single year, and provide effective, accurate and detailed data. The work of our healthcare scientists is vital to ensuring that our patients get the right treatment, for the right conditions, at the right time.
To also mark this year's Healthcare Science Week, we are pleased to announce the development of a bespoke Healthcare Science hub on our website to help inform colleagues, patients, visitors and any interested member of the public about the diverse variety of roles held by HCS in our organisation - and how fresh and aspiring talent within the field of healthcare science can get involved with UHDB and the wider NHS to support the delivery of exceptional patient care.
Working closely with our partners at Derbyshire Pathology and HCS across UHDB, we are continually developing this new area on our website, which will soon include a profile of every Healthcare Science role within our organisation. We will also be sharing the profiles of some of our inspiring HCS colleagues on social media to celebrate this important awareness week. You can access this new and evolving section of the website, here >
Make sure you keep your eyes peeled on the page for more information over the coming weeks and months - and learn more about the many varied roles of our incredible healthcare science colleagues, all that they do to support patient care, and how you can get involved.