Profile

I love cooking, singing, reading and being active.

I row at London Rowing Club…

…and have recently taken up running ultramarathons. This is be at the start and finish of a 55 km race!

I also sing in a local Choral Society with my Mum. I live close to the Hospital with my boyfriend and we love to take advantage of our central location by walking and cycling round the city.

I am very lucky that in my job I rotate into three different sections of my department. That means that every 4-6 weeks I get to move into  very different job role!

The first section I work in is treatment planning. In this department I work with a large range of doctors and radiographers to individually plan each patient’s radiotherapy treatment. We have to decide how to have the patient positioned, and what angles, shapes and energies to use for the radiation beams. We have specialist software which allows us to see what the radiation dose distribution will be within the patient for the treatment plan we have created. Then we can optimise the plan to make sure the tumour is getting a big enough dose, but no organs are going to be damaged by too much radiation.

The second area I work in is known as dosimetry and quality control. When I am working in this section I am responsible for looking after all the scanners and radiotherapy machines, and making sure that they are delivering the radiation treatments accurately. This involves performing lots of test measurements on the machines, and also delivering patient treatments to “phantoms” – blocks of plastic into which we can insert radiation detectors to make sure the machine is delivering the dose distribution we expect.

The third area I work in is called brachytherapy, which literally translates as “near therapy”. Brachytherapy is a type of radiotherapy that involved putting radioactive sources inside or near tumours to treat them from the inside out! It is normally used when the areas of the body that needs treating is easy to access such as skin or cervical cancer. When I am working in this section I often go to the operating theatre to help guide the surgeon where to place the radioactive sources within the patient.

7:30 – 10:30: There is always a physicist on hand at the beginning of the day to help with any errors or issues that may occur whilst the machines are begin switched on and warmed up. We often also take advantage of the time before the patients arrive to conduct some measurements on the machines such as testing out a new technique on a phantom.

10:30 – 13:00: The rest of the morning is usually spent catching up with emails, meetings and depending on my rota I may also spend time creating a treatment plan for a patient. We also have regular learning sessions where staff take it in turn to update the department on the most current techniques and working practices such as clinical trials we are involved in or research they are conducting.

13:00 – 14:00: Lunch! My department is very friendly so we often try and have lunch in large groups. This can be a really good time to discuss any project work we are currently doing, as well as general friendly chatter!

14:00 – 16:30: Unless I am rota’d to be completing quality control on one of our machines, I will often use this time to catch up on any project work I am involved in such a reading scientific papers or analysing measurement data we may have taken in the morning.

16:30 – 18:30: The evening can be another useful time to get time for measurements on the treatment machines. A physicist will always stick around until all the treatments for the day are finished to make sure we are on had to help if there are any problems.