NSERC CREATE 'Engineers in Scrubs' - Fostering Innovation in Medical Technology by Training Biomedical Engineers in the Clinical Environment

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In complex technology application areas such as healthcare, it is not enough for engineers to be technically competent - they need a deep experiential understanding and appreciation of the needs of the users of their technologies and the environment in which their technologies will be used if they are to work effectively at the interface between engineering research, medical research, clinical practise and product development. We know from the innovation literature that we must explicitly foster strong linkages between the academic laboratories where new technologies frequently originate, the clinical milieu in which the need for new technologies arises and the small medical device community where the initial stages of product development occur in order to ensure that we realize the greatest benefits possible from the insights generated in our research labs. We therefore propose an "Engineers in Scrubs" (EiS) training program in which biomedical engineering trainees do a significant portion of their training in the hospital and are explicitly trained in and participate in medical technology innovation processes, including a multidisciplinary medical technology design experience which will foster creativity, critical thinking and synthesis and integration between disciplines, all of which are skills highly desired by future employers. Highlights of the EiS program will be a month-long intensive introduction to the clinical world to be undertaken in the August just before the traditional start to the academic year, followed by a year-long interdisciplinary design project tightly linked to a structured and collaborative problem identification and prioritization process to be undertaken annually in each of our four major research clusters in biomedical engineering at UBC.