Mark Knight

Hello, my name is Mark Knight. I live in Maidstone in Kent and I'm a healthcare scientist working in the NHS. That's our National Health Service.

So my current job is a strategic role that sits right across a big area, in my case, Kent and Medway in England. And if you look at healthcare science, that spans lots of different areas.

So we all know about blood tests that we have in hospitals, that's dealt with by a pathology service.

We all know about X-rays, probably most of us have had an X-ray at some point in our lives, that the safety of those X-rays and the quality will be looked after by medical physics and clinical engineering services.

And you might have had some tests of body functions. So things like if you're asthmatic, a breathing test, you might have had tests on your hearing.

These are all carried out by healthcare scientists as well, working in physiological science.

And the last area, this is the fourth area, which is very exciting, is genomics and genomics is the study of our DNA.

As we know as human beings, we all have unique DNA. That's what gives me my hair colour, my eye colour, but also it might tell me what kind of diseases that I will get in future.

So in the NHS, we're now using that genomics information to help us to treat people before they get sick to try and prevent them getting it in the first place.

So a typical day in my current role is very much about getting all of those strategic elements in healthcare science lined up.

To give you one example, we all know about artificial intelligence. It's the big story of the moment. So we use that, for example, in medical imaging. So if I have a chest X-ray, we might be looking for the cancer of my lungs.

And we can use an artificial intelligence system now to actually find those cancers and highlight them right to the top of the reporting pile for my radiologist, the person that does the diagnosis. They can then send me directly to a CT scanner and CT would then very precisely be able to tell me, actually, this person's got cancer and we need to get them on a treatment pathway as quickly as possible.

So my job would be to say, we've got that good practice going on in one part of Kent, but why don't we make sure that everybody in Kent does the same thing? Why don't we make sure that all of the departments are sharing information properly and setting up those protocols?

So that's the strategic stuff that I do. But actually, in my previous role, I was a scientist working right at the front face of medicine. I was delivering treatments to patients and having one-to-one interactions.

Who would have thought that with a degree in physics, you could go and work directly with patients?

And so my day-to-day work there might have included actually delivering radioactive CAT tools to patients to cure them from their cancers, which is a very rewarding thing to have been able to do.

So you can imagine in medicine, it's a highly complicated process. Every procedure that we do with patients, whether that's diagnosing something that they might have wrong with them or treating the condition once we know that they've got it, involves many, many disciplines.

We know of doctors and nurses and we'll have seen those in our daily care, but we also will have experienced care from people like physiotherapists, radiographers who take X-rays, and in healthcare science, we would be interacting with all of those people.

So if you take a radiotherapy treatment, for example, you might have your diagnosis and treatment plan initially from a doctor, but it will be a physicist that will do all of the mathematical calculations and the radiation monitoring to make sure that those radiotherapy treatments are delivered safely.

It will be a radiographer, that will then deliver those treatments to you safely when you come into hospital.

So you can see that only by having those three people working together will you achieve the right level of safe treatment and care for patients.

And of course, above that then, we would then be working with managers, with executives, on making those key decisions. Some of our equipment is very, very expensive and it sits in very, very expensive buildings.

So we as scientists would need to influence the process of making sure we buy the best equipment possible and we put it into a safe environment that's suitable for our patients.

So I think the best thing about my job is the unpredictability. So I never know from one day to the next what I'm going to be doing.

I might think, this is my plan for the day, but then something will turn up and I'll have to start working on that.

I really enjoy interacting with so many people. I've talked about the different professions in the NHS. That's a really rewarding part of the job because everybody has a different perspective on how we should best deliver our patient care. And it's only by really listening to each other and working together that we achieve the best outcomes.

I deal with members of the public as well. And that public engagement can be really interesting. You get some quite surprising questions sometimes from members of the public. And you have to be, as a scientist, thinking on your feet about how am I going to deliver the message back to those members of the public in a way that they'll understand, but they'll also feel reassured and confident about.

So those, I think, are the things that I really enjoy most about my job.

So I think the hardest part of my current role, which is the very strategic role, is trying to get everyone to agree.

So you can imagine that in the example that I talked about before with the artificial intelligence that I'm using in radiology, I've got lots of different departments. They've all got slightly different ideas. They've all got different types of patient groups. They've all got different financial priorities as well.

So trying to align those departments and persuade them, actually, this is the best way forward. This is what we should all be doing together, is quite a challenging part of the role.

What I find personally is that 95% of people are really on board and keen to work together and get the best outcomes. And it's that last 5% that probably could be defined as the hardest part of my role.

But also in some ways, the most interesting to to deal with, you how do you overcome their questions or the difficulties that they have with implementing something that we think is a good way forward.

Of course, working with patients, it can be quite a very rewarding part of the job. You know, it can be quite difficult sometimes. You're working with people who are quite ill but also extremely rewarding, and I think really that would sit on both sides of my fence, the hard part but also probably the most rewarding part of the job as well.

So I started work, well, I started in education with a physics degree. I was always interested in science at school. I did the classic physics, chemistry and maths A-Levels and went on to study physics at university.

And really when I came to the end of my degree, I didn't have a great deal of idea what I wanted to do.

But I did find this profession. I knew I did want to work with physics. I didn't want to go into a role, maybe like finance, where I wasn't going to be using my physics directly. I wanted to use my physics.

And I found this role that actually used the physics, but also allowed me to work with patients and provide that health and care pathways to people, which is incredibly rewarding.

So I went from my physics degree then onto a training scheme with the National Health Service. This was many years ago, but we still have a similar training scheme today. And I did the training scheme, which included a master's degree as part of the program. And then having finished that, I was into the world of medical physics. And then like most careers, you can specialize more.

The lovely thing about my job in medical physics is you could work in a very clinical environment. So I described the treatments that we do as direct patient facing interactions. You could work in an academic environment. So you might be in a university doing research, for example, into our latest technologies.

Or you could be in a role like I am now, a more strategic role, which is instead of directly dealing with patients or research, you're working on a much more strategic level to make sure that you've got that embedded as well as you possibly can in your area.

That's a very good question.

So I think at school, you really get the foundations of your scientific mind and way of thinking that influences how you work throughout your whole working life if you're going to be a scientist. And really, you build on that from school through your A-Levels, through your university education, and through your training schemes.

I think building that analytical mindset, having that mathematical understanding, that really influences how you approach all of your problems.

A scientific problem is fairly obvious. I would use my mathematical skills or my computing skills to deal with that.

But maybe less obvious is how do you deal with a complex business case? You know, we want to spend multi-million pounds on delivering a new therapy for patients. How do we know that that's the best type of therapy? How do we know that we're delivering that to the right population?

So there's a lot of statistics, mathematics, analysis that goes into building those business cases, which a scientist will approach with that scientific and reasoning mindset.

I think the other thing at school, I always think, you've got your educational side, but you've also got that whole interaction side.

You're in a class with other people if you're in a school environment and you're learning how to work in teams, how to do projects together and those things really they carry on throughout your working life.

You know, look at my current role. I work with many, many different people from across different professions to deliver the things that we deliver today and teamwork which was embedded in my school life is a big part of that.

I do have one specific example, which was a lady who had a child who had had a medical procedure, and she was very, very concerned about this procedure. She was really upset about the procedure and it was starting to impact her life and how she was moving forwards.

And I had a conversation with this lady for around about an hour. It turns out she's a scientist as well. So we were able to dig down into the scientific detail of the medical procedure she'd had, have a look at the risks and benefits together.

And by the end of the conversation, she'd left with a really very different perspective on what the procedure had been with her daughter and she was greatly reassured.

I received a lovely Christmas card from her after the event to say that actually it really turned her around that conversation. She was happy. She knew that the daughter had had the best care possible and she was really pleased with the way things had gone.

And it's things like that. And you do find that those are repeated throughout your working life, particularly if you work with patients, there are always going to be those rewarding moments where you've made a big difference to someone's life. You might have cured them of cancer with a treatment that you've delivered.

And those are life changing situations for those patients. And you've been a big part of delivering that.

I think good advice that if I'd had when I was younger would be to really seize the day and follow your heart.

Doing a job is a big commitment. You spend a lot of time at work. So actually, if you can do something that you really enjoy, not only enjoy but feel passionate about, it's actually embedded in your daily life, it becomes you.

I'm Mark, I live in Kent and I go to work, but actually part of me is always going to be a scientist or a physicist in healthcare that's delivering those things.

And I think, you know, seizing those opportunities when they come along, sometimes it takes a little bit of bravery, doesn't it, to think I'm going to step outside what I'm comfortable with, I'm going to try something a bit different.

And I think that's a really good advice to follow that if you think you can do it and it will be a rewarding thing to do, then go for it.