Rachael Andrews - design and innovation engineer/clinical scientist

My primary role is leading projects to design and manufacture novel medical devices that address unmet clinical needs. My team works with clinicians from across our hospitals – they bring clinical expertise and first-hand experience of the clinical need, and CEI provides an engineering perspective, so together we form the perfect problem-solving team!

As well as leading several design projects, I provide technical support to the CCRC’s metabolic research facility, I am a line manager to a technician, and I am involved in teaching, training and outreach work. In addition, I recently re-established the East of England Healthcare Science Network, which aims to connect the fragmented healthcare science workforce within and between Trusts and to raise the profile of our often-overlooked profession.

My team has been heavily involved medical equipment aspects of the COVID-19 response, with a strong focus on PPE: determining suitability of non-standard donated or procured PPE, coordinating the efforts of local engineering businesses to make best use of available resources, creating simple PPE designs for rapid production by local non-medical manufacturers, and designing better masks for healthcare workers, to name but a few! I helped with redeployment of CUH healthcare scientists into clinical engineering, and I enabled a crucial non-COVID project to continue throughout the pandemic.

The variety, both in the design projects and my other tasks.