What are healthcare scientists (HCS)?

Healthcare scientists are a highly diverse scientific workforce improving health and wellbeing of patients.

This community of dedicated scientific colleagues help to inform, and underpin around 80% of all diagnoses - making up around 5% of the entire NHS workforce.

Healthcare science is vital, not only for care of our patients, but also to develop innovative tests and treatments for future care.

Healthcare science at UHDB falls into three broad and overlapping areas - Pathology Services, Physiological Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. However, healthcare sciences work in several fields beyond these three core areas, and their work is crucial to delivering patient care.

Types of job roles

  1. What is a biomedical scientist?

    Biomedical scientists conduct laboratory and scientific tests to support the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
  2. What is a vascular scientist?

    If you work in vascular science, you’ll use ultrasound and other non-invasive techniques to image and assess the blood flow of patients with diseases of the arteries and veins.
  3. Associate practitioner in blood sciences

    If you work in blood sciences, you’ll play a crucial role in the diagnosis of illness by helping doctors choose the best type of treatment for patients, and monitoring its effectiveness.

Why choose healthcare science at UHDB?

UHDB aims to be a career innovator. We provide practice placement opportunities for undergraduates, and we support both apprenticeships and ‘return to practice’ placement opportunities.

We also provide the opportunity for direct entry to the professions at Masters level. In all of this, we are supported by our Practice Learning Facilitation Unit, which houses our educators in collaboration with the local universities.

As a group of professions, we have recently worked to produce a five-year AHP and HCS clinical strategy, which outlines not only how we make a difference, but also how we work in different ways across our professional groups to deliver excellence in clinical care. We are focused on using unique talents of all our HCSs to inform and support innovations in practice.