Profile

Hi,

My name’s Will and I’m a northerner hiding in the South West. I moved recently from Newcastle but I grew up in a place called Clitheroe about an hour’s drive from Manchester. Moving to Bristol to start my career was a big step but one I enjoyed taking and would love to inspire the same passion in others.

My favourite sports are tennis and football ( any Liverpool fans?) and I also go rock climbing despite my fear of heights! I also love film, my favourites being Iron Man and Dune.

I love living in Bristol and have become an honorary Bristol City fan as I live just 5 minutes from the Stadium. I have not quite come round on the cornish pasties yet but I love a run under and over the Clifton Bridge.

Being a trainee, I am currently visiting neighbouring departments in and around the South West. This has included medical physics (very clever people who deal with MRI and X-Rays), cardiology (heart specialists), neurophysiology (brain specialists) and a place in Cardiff where they make special custom wheelchairs for people with complex disabilities. This is all with an aim of understanding how devices are used by other departments and how we, as clinical scientists, can help to support the safe use of these.

I also have a number of ongoing projects within my department. We are responsible for managing all the devices that will likely come into contact with a patient between Bristol and Weston-Super-Mare. This can range from a machine which delivers medicine at a controlled speed to incubators to keep babies warm to ECG’s which are those sticky pads which measure your heart beat. We also help other departments if they need a specific device which they don’t have access to as well as dealing with when things go wrong with the equipment (which doesn’t happen too often, touch wood)!

My days vary a lot as a trainee as I need to gather a lot of knowledge about different areas of our department in order to best equip me to perform my job as a fully registered clinical scientist in the future.

Recently, I observed a procedure that places a new valve in someone’s heart, the thing that makes the classic “bu-bum” sound and makes blood go the right way through the heart. They do this in an operating theatre so I had to put scrubs (essentially very clean pyjamas) on and make sure I was watching everything that happened. I finished this by 12pm and spent the next hour writing up what I had observed before heading for lunch.

In the afternoon, I had a meeting with my training officer (my boss) to review how my training was going and to identify areas that I may want to become better at. After this, I helped my colleague out by taking part in her research study. She is trying to create a small device which will allow doctors to check how much oxygen is in a baby’s brain during birth.