I see this as a professional recognition and a professional status in your profession. I believe the route to a higher position within the organisation can happen as well as with the reward.

What else would you benefit with a professional qualification?

Chris,

Why would or should this supprise you? The FD currently has an engineering element which includes a range of subjects such as statics and dynamics, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics and elctrical science. This can be increased or decreased in size, subject and complexity dependent upon advice. As you know so much about the content of the FD maybe you would like to suggest where you feel it requires upgrading?

Again if you have a look at foundation degree forward website it you may get a better feeling for FD's.

all of the students are employed within a medical engineering environment and have chosen to complete a work related/based degree in their chosen profession. upon completion they will be allowed to use FDSc after their names; they can if the so wish complete a final year to gain a full Hons degree. through life learning is the key here. If this is also helps get onto the VRCT, great. If IET recognition follows even better....

To gain IET accreditation a course requires a minimum of 2/3rd's Engineering content. Although technically I suppose you could claim some of clinical subjects included Engineering, it's still way too short.

If Eastwood Park wants to get IET accreditation they should contact the IET, but since the IET don't retrospectively accredit, the website should drop "and membership of relevant Professional Bodies" until it does.

Hi Chris,

I will pass this advice on to the relavent person. Cheers.

Hi Rob,

Just to reply to your earlier post. All of our "newbies" are given in-house training on medical equipment. This allows us to focus on the equipment we service. As I have mentioned in previous posts there are a lot of devices that we don't work on, why waste time educating staff on things that they won't be working on. The important thing to us is that new staff prove their engineering capabilities through approved college/ university courses.
If our trainees want to expand their medical equipment knowledge they can do it via CPD.

Hi Bill,

The MoD route for medical equipment training is an ideal template and one that is easily emulated, you take selected technicians ONC/HNC/HND with years of practical experience in electronics working on Tels, Radar, Gen Tech systems (latter added for our RAF friends). Complete the infamous Arborfield (Med Dent) course; this is a generic 5 month (now 12 weeks) long course. The course allowed them to get real hands on with simulated practical faults thrown in etc along with learning relevant anatomy and physiology, then and only then allow them into a medical equipment environment. It works.

I assume like the MoD and Eastwood park you also cover the subjects that are laid down within the new National occupational standards for medical equipment engineering?

If you combine the HNC/HND with Generic medical equipment training theory and practical work mapped to subjects within the National occupational standards, include mentor support from within the Trust and you have your Foundation degree.

Personally speaking, having completed a HND, Hons degree and Arborfield Med Dent course (order of importance of course), I only wish the foundation degree was available at that time.

Most Trusts I would assume do not have the funding nor wish to contemplate in house qualified technical engineering trainers, particularly given the numbers involved here.

Your last point is the cruncher, Rob. But the NHS as whole is a pretty big firm. Indeed, it used to have its own Engineering School. If my memory serves me well, it was called "Eastwood Park"!

Yes it does, and very well too!

Oh how times have changed! A solid "RedBrick" obtained Degree with full IEEE accreditation being replaced with a much more watered down (Spoon fed) version. Sums up the UK education system as a whole me thinks!
Bring back apprenticeships and parallel formal education! Put the “Great” back into Britain! Vote me!

Eddie

PS Thanks for that, I feel much better now!

Yes, the oft-mentioned "Arborfield model" was indeed a good one, but I doubt that it's "easily emulated", unfortunately.

By the time guys turned up to be trained as biomeds (at Arborfield) they were already at ONC level, with a few years of experience (working on the green kit) behind them, and were also (and this, to my mind, is the important thing) of proven ability. They were volunteers, incidentally, and had to have been recommended as being suitable (not every tech is, or was).

It seems that in civvy street, and the NHS is the prime example of this, managers are looking for "ready made solutions", or if you like "off the shelf" technicians, without having to bother about training, mentoring, "bringing them on" ... or whatever you want to call it.

What is needed (and obviously so, I would have thought) is a National Hospital Engineering School (Academy, College ... whatever), where suitable raw material gets fed in at one end, and (probably a couple of years later) technicians, electricians and all the rest emerge from the other!

Can't all of us get together to form a biomedical engineering society for this purpose. They are many talented and knowledgeable people around. Seek funding from the sponsors, etc. Perhaps, Bill Gates. Train where it applies to the market demand.