I know the Modernising Scientific Careers (MSC) program has troubled the minds of many Cardiac Physiologists recently. When I first read about MSC, I was also concerned about its implications.
However, the more I delved into it and understood what it could help us to achieve, the less I feared it.
Before MSC there were over fifty healthcare science career paths with multiple exit routes, funding arrangements and no clear structure. MSC creates a structured educational framework for all healthcare scientists and more importantly, for the first time ever, Cardiac Physiologists have a defined career path from band one to band nine.
MSC has ordered the career paths into three streams:-
Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Physiological Sciences, which currently has two pathways Cardiovascular, Respiratory and Sleep (CVRS) and Neurosensory science.
MSC has two main methods for change, education and service transformation.
The educational component has already started with the withdrawal of the strategic health authorities (SHA) funding for the old style cardiac physiology degree programs.
In its place the Practitioner Training Program (PTP) and Scientist Training Program (STP) have been created along with the future planned development of Higher Specialist Scientist Training programs (HSST), Consultant Healthcare Scientists and the expansion of foundation degrees for the Assistant and Associate Practitioners.
The PTP BSc level students are self funded and are farmed out to hospital placements. Also, they will not have expected to have the competencies as the old BSc. when they graduate.
The STP MSc level students are currently funded by the SHA and placements are awarded to trusts from the SHA Science Education
Commissioning Leads. These students are recruited to trusts via a national recruitment program and they are funded by the SHA. The funding includes educational fees and they are paid a flat rate for three years at the bottom of AFC band six. SHA’s may or may not pay for travel expenses. This may be an important factor to look at as currently only Newcastle University has been accredited to run the CVRS STP.
Cardiac STP students will spend three months in their first year rotating around Cardiovascular, Respiratory and Sleep and then they will have blocks in clinical assessments and investigations.
The Cardiac STP student will graduate from the program with either specialising in cardiac rhythm management or cardiac imaging.
The second method MSC has for change is ‘work force planning’. The MSC team is in the process of rolling out the Physiological Sciences work force profiling tool, which is designed to allow managers to critically review all levels of Cardiac Physiology, with a view to matching department skills mix to meet the needs of the patients. In other words, to stop Senior Physiologists performing tasks that an Associate Practitioner could perform. This is not a “dumbing down” exercise set against us. It is an enabler designed to help departments increase efficiency and allows highly skilled physiologists to do what they do best.
The reality is MSC has happened and it is here to stay. We can try and fight it but it will eventually win out because it has changed the way we train our students and they are our future work force.
Once we have accepted this we can move forward and capitalise on this massive opportunity.
We have to stop the internal wrangling and stop blaming our professional bodies as we have more pressing areas to direct our attention. We are newcomers to the SHA funded MSc level training and older more established scientific groups, who have SHA appointed lead scientists, who need convincing that we are eligible and scientists in our own right. Even if you don’t call yourself a scientist, if you are competent in Echo or Pacing follow-up in MSC terms you are a Scientist and that’s what we need to train.
We need to make sure the SHA Lead Scientists and the SHA Science Education Commissioning Leads know who we are and that we need these STP funded places. This year Cardiac Physiology was awarded 3 of the 157 SHA funded STP places in England. This represents a 1.9% share of the awards.
Cardiac Physiology represents 8% of the total healthcare science work force, so we have a way to go considering we are already playing catch-up with the more established healthcare scientists.
If you care what the future holds for Cardiac Physiology contact your trusts education department, work force planning and your SHA Education Commissioning Leads and tell them you must have an STP trainee for 2012/13.
