Profile

I live near Oxford with my husband, in a tiny cottage built in the 1700’s.  We have 2 middle-aged incredibly spoilt tomcats who love nothing more than sleeping on our laps.

I am passionate about travel so like to go abroad whenever possible!  My plan B would be to become a scuba diving instructor somewhere in Thailand 🙂

My all time favourite food is Belgian fries the way my nan makes them, and late night cheese and pickle sandwiches.  When I’m not working or travelling I like to go hiking, play board games, or Tomb Raider.

I’m currently still training, on the NHS’s STP scheme, which you may have heard about.  It’s a 3 year long scheme and I will be exactly halfway next month (party time!).

I am specialising in radiotherapy physics and have 3 main rotations:

Machines, which is where I learn all about the linear accelerators we use at our hospitals to kill cancer, and also the quality assurance we need to do on them.  Quality assurance may sound a bit boring but it’s really not, honestly!  We have to do tons of tests to ensure that the machines (we call linear accelerators, or linacs for short) give the right amount of radiation as any mistakes there can be very dangerous for our patients.

Treatment planning, where I will be taught how to make treatment plans which specify the amount of radiation a patient will receive, and the x-ray beam configuration needed, and so on.  These plans get checked several times (again for safety reasons!) and then the linacs use these to deliver the radiation to the patients.

Brachytherapy, this is a type of radiotherapy treatment whereby a radioactive pellet (the size of a grain of rice) is brought directly into the patient, or very near to the patient, for a certain amount of time.  The doctor and physicist decide together which treatment (linac or brachy) is suitable for each patient.

When I finish my training I will probably be involved in all 3 of the above rotations, as well as research.  The variety is definitely a great perk!

As I am training at the moment I spend about half of my time observing things in the department, whether that is treatments being carried out or tests being performed on the machines, and the other half writing up what I have seen.

Once I’m not a trainee anymore I could be either spending my time doing a lot of tests (and recording + analysing the results), or creating/checking treatment plans, or I could be on the physics helpdesk (the first port of call for any ‘physicsy’ problems in the department), or I could be doing research, or training future physicists, etc.

There is no real typical day, and it’s never boring!