Medicine, Medical Sciences & Research

Addicted to Casualty, Holby City or (whisper it) Doctors? Want to work in medicine but being fed on a diet of unrealistic career expectations courtesy of American medical dramas? You might want to switch off the TV and learn what working in medicine really involves. I’ll give you a hint: it probably won’t involve working for a misanthropic, drug addicted doctor with a limp. Well, you never know!

Every day in the UK, over 835,000 people visit their local doctor’s surgery, almost 50,000 people visit accident and emergency departments and 36,000 people are in hospital for planned treatment. At some point in their lives, pretty much everyone in the UK will been dependent on the specialist skills of medical staff, dentists and medical scientists. That’s over 70 million people. Put that in your pipe and smoke it (smoke metaphorically though of course, we wouldn’t want you to burden the health service any more). It goes without saying, these guys are ridiculously important. 

Anyway, careers in medicine aren’t as simple as playing doctors and nurses, there are also a huge amount of career options available which you probably didn’t even know existed. Phlebotomists, anyone? No? It’s the person who collects blood from patients for examination in laboratories. Yes, you can give yourself a pat on the back if you already knew that.

The medical industry is home to the largest employer in Europe: the NHS. It also houses a growing private healthcare sector and medical research companies such as Bupa and GlaxoSmithKline. There are so many specialist areas of medicine, medical science and research, many requiring a huge degree of medical, technical and scientific knowledge.

Understandably, doctors, surgeons, dentists, pharmacologists and medical research scientists need to be absolute experts in their specialist field. You’ll need an excellent academic background if you want to pursue these careers. However, many other career options do exist in the industry requiring people with more specialist practical or care skills, such as nurses, technical healthcare assistants and laboratory assistants.

Many people work in medical research and development careers, either for the NHS, or for major pharmaceutical companies. These guys use high-level scientific expertise, which involves researching, developing, and improving medical supplies, medications, drugs, ointments, creams and other treatments. A few examples include: biomedical scientists, biochemists, pharmacologists, and many more. Healthcare scientists might focus on life sciences (such as pathology, genetics or embryology) or on physiological sciences (such as research and development concerned with blood and organ transplants) or on clinical engineering and physical sciences.

There are too many different specialist doctors, nurses, dentists and other medical careers to mention here (paramedics, radiographers, geneticists, forensic scientists, dieticians etc.). With so much to find out, you’d better start exploring the rest of this sector now!