Portia Banda is a 2nd year Manchester Metropolitan University biomedical science student. She is currently on placement in research at Salford Royal and has blogged about her experience.
Taking on this role has turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made – even though initially I wasn’t really interested in research.
I thought it was something that meant being in the labs constantly and not having any patient facing opportunities. But when I looked at the research support worker role, I saw that most of the team’s trials involved having that patient facing role, with a mixture of non-clinical and clinical trials.
New skills
Fast forward almost a year and I have been able to gain a lot of skills such as venepuncture training, care certificate and Good Clinical Practice (GCP) certificate.
My day-to-day tasks include recruiting patients, screening for patients, recruiting patients over the phone and gaining their consent to take part in research studies. I have also been given the full responsibility of taking over one of the studies, assisting with taking bloods and nasal samples during both the recruitment and follow up periods..
I was both excited and nervous as having sole responsibility for a study was such a big step – but the responsibility helped me grow professionally and reinforced my desire to pursue a career in clinical research and healthcare.
Having a biomedical science degree allows you a lot of exposure in different areas and different links with the modules that you study at university. On placement, it’s amazing to have more hands-on experience and to see the links between research in areas such as respiratory, neurology, immunology which I’ve previously studied. It wasn’t just theory any more, I got to apply some of that knowledge in a real-world setting.
Careers insight
And that gave me the chance to figure out what specialities I might pursue in future.
I’ve also been able to shadow teams such as anaesthetics and stroke/trauma, which gave me a proper insight into what their day to day looks like. It was very helpful to see how varied and flexible their work can be, especially in patient facing roles.
During this placement, I have realised that you cannot expect every day to be the same. You may have some down days, when work seems longer and then other days, time just flies by. But it is always important to ensure that you are making the best use you can of the days, getting more insight into the healthcare careers that are out there. This may be the only time you’ll get to have this much experience in different specialities and departments. So, take as much advantage as you can – this experience can be life changing for your future career path.