Inspired by the relaunch of the Future
Morph website with its excellent careers advice section, we
decided to profile some science jobs you may never have encountered
before to help you inspire your students. Some are relatively
normal, while others are definitely not for the faint hearted.
These articles will also provide links to teaching
resources and ideas for classroom activities and experiments.
Last time we looked at the mud-filled career of a marine
palaeoclimatologist.
This time let's look at something a bit more gory...
2. Clinical Perfusion Scientist (Perfusionist)
Everyone has heard of surgeons. Maybe you even know
someone who has had to go into hospital to have some sort of
heart
surgery. But have you ever thought about the
person whose job it is to keep you alive while they are fiddling
around inside you?
If you want to find out some facts about the heart before we
begin, click here.
Way back in 1812 (that's 200 years ago!) a man called Caeser Le
Gallois suggested the idea of a machine to replace the heart.
141 years later Dr John
Gibbon performed the first successful open heart surgery using
a heart-lung machine.
A clinical
perfusionist is the person who is in charge of the
heart-lung machine during a heart operation while the surgeons are
doing all the slicing and dicing. It is his or her job to
make sure that the patient's blood keeps being pumped around their
body and that they are getting enough oxygen.
That's quite a lot of responsibility!
Why not have a go at the British Heart Foundation's heart
surgery game to see if you have what it takes to work in an
operating theatre by clicking here.
There's plenty more on the CBHF website to look at as
well. Follow this link more information, games and more : CBHF Website
So, what kind of person do you
need to be to become a perfusionist?
- You need to be able to work under a lot of pressure as part of
a team
- You would need to be able to concentrate for long periods of
time, sometimes working in the middle of the night
- You need to be ready to jump into action at any time of day or
night whenever your beeper tells you that your skills are needed at
the hospital
- You need to have a strong stomach - no fainting allowed when
the surgeons start to cut open the patient!
- You need to be prepared to study hard and go to university.
When you start a job as a perfusionist the training carries on as
you learning all the skills you need to keep someone alive when
their heart isn't pumping
Finally, why should I become a clinical
perfusionist?
- What could be better than going home knowing that you have
helped to save a persons life, or make it better in an amazing
way?
- Once you have trained as a clinical scientist there are all
sorts of other jobs that you can think about doing in hospitals,
universities and in the business world
More weird and wonderful careers ideas will be coming soon to
Planet Science, so subscribe to
our newsletter and we can keep you posted.