Celebrating clinical engineering

CLINICAL engineering took centre stage for a visit by the Deputy Chief Scientific Officer for NHS England to an NHS Trust recently.

Victoria Chalker visited the clinical engineering department at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London.

She was taken on a tour of the department by IPEM Fellow Dr Emmanuel Akinluyi, who is Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Chief Biomedical Engineer and Head of Clinical Engineering at Guy’s and St Thomas’.

There were presentations by several engineers within the department on the breadth of work being undertaken to help patients and clinical teams.

The presentations demonstrated how the team are actively supporting training for clinical engineering and considering how to support more routes for development, with the support of the Trust, and scientific and executive leadership through the Office of the Trust Chief Medical Officer. They showed a concentrated focus on maximising technology enables care in the home and community settings, and that when tackling clinical and/or operational challenges, if clinical engineers are involved from the outset, they can partner very effectively, to co-develop better solutions.

Victoria Chalker said: ‘The scope of work was very impressive, with the team managing thousands of devices within the hospital, leading on training future clinical engineers and working with drive to develop innovations to support patients.’