The Clinician Engineer Hub is now active in Cambridge
The Clinician Engineer Hub, an international network aimed at bridging the gap between medicine and engineering, has landed in Cambridge from its launch base in Birmingham.
It began in 2019 as a collaboration between Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Imperial College London and King’s College London and has been growing ever since.
The Hub offers educational, research and industry opportunities for medical students and doctors keen on developing engineering know how in healthcare. It has gained support from multiple institutions including the Mayo Clinic and the World Health Organisation and its efforts thus far have been recognised by The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.
Educational events thus far have included winter and summer school programmes at no cost where participants have spent time immersed in both the hospital and lab-based settings. When Covid started spreading events moved online and remain freely available on the Hub’s YouTube channel. This enables individuals globally to access content anytime anywhere at no added expense. The Hub recognises that not everyone can afford the expense of training programmes and, by having its content online, candidates can benefit greatly in terms of learning. Its webinars have seen speakers from Google Health, Amazon and Microsoft.
Its research activities are in partnership with various lab spaces. Many academics have shown a keen interest in supporting learners and have offered their labs to assist in the growth of future clinician engineers. Recently, for example, clinicians from Qatar University visited lab spaces at Imperial’s Dyson School of Engineering where they were immersed in robotics and sensing devices.
The Hub has also been working closely with industry partners. One such partner is i3 simulations, which is developing immersive technologies designed to enhance the training of healthcare providers.
The Hub’s founder and director, Dr Neel Sharma, is based at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He said: “‘Cambridge is the home of Silicon Fen with numerous tech-based companies. The environment is just perfect for further expansion of the Hub. It is an exciting time for innovation across the clinician engineer interface and I am hopeful that many more opportunities will be granted for doctors who wish to pursue clinician engineering as their focus.
He added: “We constantly use a range of engineering tools in medicine to diagnose and treat patients, from pacemakers to ventilators and dialysis machines, but often we’re unaware of how and why they work. As doctors, we experience first-hand limitations in how patients are diagnosed or managed. This knowledge, however, falls short without adequate engineering know-how. The Clinician Engineer Hub is an opportunity for future doctors and engineers to work together and better understand how each discipline can influence and inform the other, creating better patient outcomes in the long-term.”
