David Hieatt is co- founder with his wife, Clare, of Hiut Denim, which sells high-end jeans around the world. David and Clare also founded the Do Lectures, a project to promote new thinking for those with curious minds www. thedolectures.com


INSPIRING STUDENTS TO GO INTO MEDICINE


By Tom Warrender My organisation, Medical Mavericks, works to inspire the next generation of medics and scientists by taking real medical and sports science equipment into schools and colleges all over the UK. The aim is to show students the wide range of careers offered in healthcare science (HCS) including jobs in medical science, patient wellbeing, lab work, technology, IT, engineering, and so on. Many can be accessed with five GCSEs at levels 9-4, or equivalent. This healthcare science sector is


JEANS GENIUS! CLOTHES FIRM GIVES APPRENTICES A BOOST


By David Hieatt Are you good at something? Like, really good. My town, Cardigan (Aberteifi in Welsh), was. It used to make jeans. It made 35,000 pairs every week for nearly 40 years. Then, one day in 2002, the factory closed. And then 400 world-class makers had nothing to make. It must be an odd feeling to be really good at something and then suddenly not being able to do it anymore. Economics meant it wasn’t viable anymore. And for 10 years that carried on being the case. Then something remarkable happened. The internet. It changed the economics for this one simple reason. You could make a high-quality pair of jeans, using the more expensive British labour and the highest quality denims from world-famous mills, and sell direct to your consumer and still be a business. It turned out we were in the right town, with the right skills at the right moment in the history of time. Call it luck. Call it anything you want. But suddenly a pipe dream of getting 400 people their jobs back wasn’t a pipe dream after all. It wouldn’t be easy, for sure. But, it was no longer impossible. So, we started the Hiut Denim Company with the aim of getting our town making jeans again, and getting those jobs back. Now, all that sounds fine. But we have challenges. Our biggest one is mother time.


Yes, we have a highly skilled workforce, but there are many candles on the birthday cakes. The GrandMasters – that’s what we call our makers – have to pass on their skills to the next generation. There are 75 different processes to making our jeans, and we only have to be world-class at 75 of them. So, we train our apprentices like our survival depends on it. Which it does.


Finding them has not been easy. But, we work with local schools and colleges, including Coleg Sir Gar, to help us find them. It turns out not everybody wants to leave the area for their education and training. And when we find them, we look after them. We try to create a work environment where people can feel safe, feel valued, and


importantly, feel part of a team that is fighting for the town to retain the skills it has spent 40 years learning. We have a three-month waiting list for jeans. And yes, we are hiring. My town is making jeans again.


the key career sector within the NHS. OK, OK, I know all careers in the NHS are important. If there were no doctors or nurses, patients would not be treated or cared for. But, if you look at this one major statistic, you’ll see why HCS is so vital for the NHS: 85 per cent of all diagnostic tests are carried out by healthcare scientists. Even more incredibly, these scientists comprise just five per cent of the entire NHS workforce – five per cent performing 85 per cent of all diagnostic tests. Amazing! So, what sorts of careers are there? There are careers that have patient contact every single day – where you get to work one on one with patients. There are careers where you are based in a lab and very rarely meet the people you are helping to treat. There are careers that are involved in surgery, careers that repair equipment, invent new equipment, give out radioactive medicine, take photographs, draw medical images, take part in organ transplants, store body tissues, store blood, and much more. These careers are split over four sub-sectors of physiology, life sciences, medical physics and engineering and bioinformatics. Want to know more? You can


request one of our free Career Inspiration Packs, which includes a copy of my book, Classroom to Clinic, 10 posters on these careers and info on our school workshops. For more information visit


www.medicalmavericks.co.uk inTUITIONTECHNICAL TEACHING • AUTUMN 2018 15


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