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

在复杂的技术应用领域，如医疗保健，工程师仅有技术能力是不够的--如果他们要在工程研究、医学研究、临床实践和产品开发之间有效地工作，他们需要对其技术用户的需求以及其技术的使用环境有深刻的经验了解和理解。 我们从创新文献中了解到，我们必须明确地在经常产生新技术的学术实验室、产生新技术需求的临床环境以及产品开发的初始阶段所在的小型医疗设备社区之间建立牢固的联系，以确保我们从研究实验室产生的见解中实现尽可能大的好处。因此，我们提出了“灌木工程师”(EIS)培训计划，让生物医学工程实习生在医院完成大部分培训，明确接受并参与医疗技术创新流程，包括将培养创造力、批判性思维以及学科之间的综合和整合的多学科医疗技术设计经验，所有这些都是未来雇主非常需要的技能。 EIS计划的亮点将是在传统学年开始前的8月份对临床世界进行为期一个月的密集介绍，然后是为期一年的跨学科设计项目，该项目与结构化和协作性的问题识别和优先顺序确定过程密切相关，每年将在我们在UBC的生物医学工程四个主要研究集群中的每个集群进行。

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.