THEY may wear white coats instead of uniforms but they are the glue that holds each hospital together.

Meet the Healthcare scientists at Poole Hospital and Royal Bournemouth Hospital. They are rarely cast into the spotlight because their roles are often unseen but they make a vital contribution to patient care every day.

And to mark Healthcare Science Week, the hospitals gave a unique insight into their work behind the scenes in everything from pathology, medical physics, microbiology and clinical engineering to nuclear medicine.

Poole Hospital opened its laboratories to all its staff to showcase their cutting edge work.

Working alongside doctors, nurses and other health professionals, around 80 per cent of all diagnoses at Poole are made possible by the 250 staff working in healthcare science.

The field is vast. Poole Hospital’s clinical engineers are responsible for the maintenance of equipment of around 9,000 medical devices worth more than £50m, while biochemists process more than 2,700 samples a day, with urgent results returned to wards and departments within an hour.

Many, like biochemistry, haematology and transfusion, operate 24 hours a day, while services including neurophysiology and maxillofacial prosthetics are using cutting edge technology to improve patient care.

Andrew Hunt, head of medical physics and Poole Hospital’s lead scientist, said: “The future of the NHS is science and technology, there’s no doubt.

“We are increasingly seeing science as the basis for medicine, with people not traditionally labelled as scientists expected to know more and more about it, for example doctors and nurses.

“Radiotherapy is unbelievably more complex than when I started out 30 years ago – even in the last 10 years the change and reliance on healthcare science and scientists has been marked. In pathology, for example, we now have the automatic analysis of samples, which frees up valuable time that scientists can spend looking at abnormal results instead of hundreds of routine results.”

Many scientists have direct patient-facing roles, measuring how a patient responds to stimuli like exercise or how their heart or another organ is functioning.

Meanwhile biomedical scientists working in microbiology like Lisa Maiden, diagnose infections such as meningitis, viral infections, septicaemia, C.difficile and MRSA.

Andrew added: “Healthcare science covers such a broad area, and without it the hospital could not function.

“In the not-too-distant future we will see genetics more and more at the heart of medicine, using an individual’s genome to predict potential predispositions to certain conditions that we can then target.

“It’s a hugely exciting time, and Poole Hospital’s scientists are playing a vital part in taking healthcare to even greater heights.”

Meanwhile Royal Bournemouth Hospital pathology department opened its doors to pupils from Bournemouth School for a tour of the department comprising haematology, histology, immunology, microbiology, cellular pathology and biochemistry laboratories.

The 77-strong team study disease, its causes and progression. Nearly every patient in the NHS has had dealings with pathology services at some point. Every time patients give a blood, stool, urine or tissue sample, it is analysed by a pathologist or pathology scientist known as a biomedical or clinical scientist, depending on their skills and qualifications.