AAMI Feature: Engineering students aren't learning the basics
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| Source: Burke Rehabilitation Hospital |
“A lot of us are getting to the point where we recognize there may be a crisis coming in a decade or so,” said James M. Adams, radiation therapy engineer, clinical engineering department at the Duke University Health System in Durham, N.C., in an interview with Healthcare Technology Management. Particularly, he said, because new recruits—while able to perform some of higher-level operations to fix medical equipment—lack some of the foundations of engineering.
“What we find is, they come to us unable to read schematics, or some of the simplest electronic circuits, which is kind of the foundation,” Adams said. “The schools see it differently. They train them with what they need to know to make it in the world. To perform the types of clinical engineering duties you’ve got to know the foundation and work your way up. You’ve got to be able to read schematics, understand block diagrams, as well as the logic of troubleshooting.”
Duke works to retain qualified engineers by offering upward mobility and pay increases, he said, but many young engineers are quick to change jobs. Engineering interns at Duke run the gamut of imaging equipment, according to Adams. One week they may work on x-rays, while another they may learn the ins and outs of a CT or an MRI, Adams noted.
“We run them through every modality in clinical engineering…We show them as much as we can,” he said. “It does take a long time to bring an engineer to fruition, even if you come out of college as an engineer.”
Duke attempts to retain some of their interns when they find the right candidate and there is a job opening, Adams said.
With complicated hospital equipment present in all the departments, two factions of engineers have developed to tackle the tasks: hardware specialists and software specialists.
“There was a time when one engineer did it all,” Adams said. “It’s all been divided. Now, there are software guys and hardware guys.”