Healthcare science staff in this field provide clinical and scientific computing expertise to multi-disciplinary teams within the physical science specialties. Typical activities include commissioning new medical systems and developing bespoke in-house software and computer systems to solve local clinical and scientific problems. Clinical Scientific Computing (CSC) staff help manage all these systems, from inception to decommissioning. CSC staff also ensure that systems communicate effectively, using standards such as DICOM for medical images or HL7 for clinical and administrative data.
CSC staff work extensively with patient data, which must be validated, securely managed and processed in line with Information Governance requirements. Requests from corporate teams, national healthcare bodies and clinical research groups are processed in line with these requirements, which include security and anonymisation. Patient and system performance data provide rich sources of material for research, clinical audit and quality improvement. Because CSC staff understand the data, and its relationships and collection pathways, they are ideally placed to work on data analysis projects.
The activities of CSC staff and associated multidisciplinary teams, through risk management and mitigation, maintains and enhances patient and staff safety.
STP training to become a CSC Clinical Scientist will give you:
- Scientific computing skills applied in a healthcare environment.
- An understanding of some of the physical science specialties in which computing and mathematical skills will be applied.
- An understanding of the local quality systems that cover CSC activity.
- Knowledge and understanding of a wide range of legislation and standards.
- Detailed understanding of relevant clinical pathways, to appreciate the risks and opportunities of implementing and managing computing solutions.
- Problem-solving skills.
- Communication skills for effective engagement with multi-disciplinary teams, corporate IT and governance staff and equipment suppliers.
- Organisation and management skills.
More on Clinical Scientific Computing
In this video from the University of York, they talk to Jack, a Principal Bioinformatician for the NHS, who talks about his career and experience on the NHS Scientist Training Programme.
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