About the Hospitals Zone

hospital mri

A hospital Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine that helps doctors see the soft tissues inside the body. | Image: Wikimedia

A modern hospital is where cutting-edge engineering meets the frailties of the human condition. Within its wards and operating rooms engineers can have direct impacts on the health and well being of patients. Although many engineers must take into account the human users of their work, there is nowhere this is more important than in a hospital. Hospitals have improved greatly in the last century or so, in large part thanks to the innovations of engineers.

Engineers can make a difference to a patient’s hospital experience in countless ways, from the design of the building itself, to making the drugs they are prescribed for treatment, to the clever ways that they can help doctors to look inside your body.

In this zone you will meet an engineer researching new ways to test for diseases, another who is using 3D cameras to improve medical imaging, and another who works in hospitals making sure that all the many different kinds of equipment are working correctly. There is also an engineer who designs hospitals to be safe from fire and another who researches better ways of making sure that drugs are safe for patients to take.