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I’m a trainee, training to be a clinical engineer (also called a clinical scientist) – a specialist engineer who does all sorts of things in hospitals.

You can find clinical engineers doing lots of things in hospitals and healthcare. What they do varies between people, but in general, together with our friends, the medical technicians, we:-

Fit and repair special wheelchairs for people with particular needs
Maintain and repair medical equipment that every patient needs (even in my city, there are over 10,000 bits of equipment that we look after!)
Test and use special measurement equipment that is so new that it needs an engineer to operate. For example, measuring electrical signals in eyes to find the reason for sight problems; measuring how much water people have in them to see if their treatment is working; and measuring how hot parts of patients are.
Use lots of cameras and a knowledge of how forces work on people’s bodies to tell doctors exactly how some patients are walking wrong, and how to fix it
Do scientific experiments to find out new things and help to treat ill people better
Set up little machines so that they give someone a tiny electric shock that helps their muscles work better
Design equipment and work out how to better use what we have, so that we can do more and give more help to anybody who needs it

According to the latest government reports, there are at least 3,309 medical technology companies in the UK. But when I was looking for a job as I finished university, I found that it’s really difficult to find them! Medical technology is such an important part of so many people’s lives, and the UK is one of the best countries in the world for it, but hardly anybody knows about what is done here!

Fortunately, all of those companies are listed in the “Bioscience and Health Technology Database”. If we were allowed to have the names and websites of those companies, it should be possible to make an automated web-crawler to categorise them all like magic!

So, what would I do with the money? If I could get hold of the right information, I would use it to build a free website where anybody could search for medical engineering and technology companies, and look up companies by what they do – prosthetics, surgical equipment, synthetic skin, stem cells, wheelchairs, robotic assistants, or whatever else…

Not only would that help newbie engineers looking for jobs, but it could show people the variety and number of organisations involved, and that would be fantastic.