Meet our teams

Alan is our clinical operations lead for radiography and joined QEH after stints at both Papworth and Addenbrookes hospitals. His career choice wasn’t one he made immediately, however, as he explains:

“I left school and all my friends had done their UCAS applications and gone off to university, and I found myself in a dead-end bar job that wasn’t really going anywhere.

“It was actually my mum that gave me a kick up the backside and said ‘there’s a job at Papworth, you should go for it’. So, I started off there as a radiology department assistant, helping out on a range of tasks from portering to cleaning the film processors for when we still used film, back in the day.

“I then became an assistant practitioner through training, did a diploma, and then followed that with two years at the university of Suffolk to do my full radiography training. I then specialised in CT and MRI, before – after three or four years – becoming the co-lead and now find myself in the clinical operations lead role.

“So, I started off relatively low down the pecking order, and I’ve worked my way up. It just goes to show, you don’t necessarily have to go straight to uni and we’re reflecting that in the department too. We’ve now got apprenticeship roles, as well as new assistant practitioner roles like the one that I used to have, as well as our clinical support workers.”

“The NHS is brilliant for supporting people to move from department to department and find their niche, their specialism. As a team we try as much as we can to promote from within and give people opportunities in their chosen field.

“My tip would be to qualify, stay here, and the chances are that you’ll have chance to progress maybe more quickly than you would at a larger Trust.”