Collaborative Clinical Engineering Internship Program between an Academic Institution and a Teaching Hospital

摘要

In the Biomedical Engineering domain, Clinical Engineering has a crucial role requiring specialization and training in the clinical setting of hospitals and clinics, to gain real-world experience with respect to safe and effective application of biomedical equipment, technologies and systems to result in efficacious and high quality patient care. The academic training coupled with internship in a teaching hospital gives a broad exposure and practical experience to the Clinical Engineering (CE) students. A new CE internship program was designed and developed at Teaching Hospital for training the student interns in multiple facets of CE by providing planned exposure and assignments, opportunities in the hospital environment. The new six-month CE internship was initiated in 2006 with a graduate student from the CE program of the University of Technology of Compiegne (UTC), France. The selection of the intern was based on his training in broad-based engineering, exposure to life science and motivation to pursue graduate studies in CE. In accordance to the intended objectives, the intern was exposed to the multi-spectral and real-time functions of CE's in hospital and was assigned to work on a couple of challenging projects of value to the BME department and of potential links to future applications. The intern's work was evaluated by his report and his presentation made at the end of the training period. The CE internship at Teaching Hospital has been a real success resulting in the student, the university faculty and the hospital BME staff receiving benefits of this collaboration. Based on the success of the first CE internship, the program is extended to be carried out on a continual basis with students from UTC and from a few other Universities, encouraging, motivating and nurturing the CE interns to learn and work towards making an impact by CE contributions in the field of healthcare delivery.