CAREERS
academics teaching on accredited courses are researchers rather than practitioners. This is both a reflection of the essential breadth of the curriculum that the profession relies on and the academic culture of the university. Many universities will atempt to mitigate the impact of this by recruiting practising guest lecturers. However, even a registered practitioner guest-lecturing appears in the academic frame as a teacher delivering content, rather than as a practitioner performing the role. So the role isn’t modelled even when the knowledge is. Taken together, these factors mean that the mirror that helps to develop an emerging sense of who we are as professionals, shows up relatively late in our development; and for those who do not secure a clinical placement as part of a sandwich degree, it may not show up at all. This was my first experience of the profession. A three-year degree that produced a confident scientist, followed by a substantive trainee position, with a training officer who was in hindsight dramatic and scary. Every minor error was met with a terrifying: “…and then the patient might die!” But beneath the catastrophising was a message that stays with me still; that the patient is at the centre of everything we do. However, it’s fair to say that a different trainee could
The mirror that helps to develop an emerging
sense of who we are as professionals, shows up relatively late in our development
have responded differently to the mode of delivery of this core professional value. With such a small pool of role models in the formative stages of professional development, each one has an oversized impact for beter or worse on how that identity forms.
The outlier As shown in Figure 1, the biomedical scientist training structure is somewhat of an outlier for HCPC-registered professions, with the most significant difference being how a clinical placement is distributed across the course. Although the professions shown share the HCPC Standards of Education and Training, which determine what elements of training must be present, the structure and organisation of those elements, is largely determined by the relevant professional body.
Table 1 compares mandatory
placement duration across these professions, and read alongside Figure 1 it reveals a further contrast. For the other professions shown, the clinical placement is structurally embedded within the degree programme. Students cannot graduate without completing them. In contrast students can graduate from an IBMS-accredited course without completing their clinical placement, pushing the burden of finding often non- supernumerary training positions and completing registration downstream and onto individual graduates. Against this backdrop, a strong professional identity maters more than ever, but what does that mean for biomedical scientists? This is a deceptively complex question.
Put any two biomedical scientists together for long enough and they will begin to trade war stories of the transformative
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