Question: What’s one of the most interesting or challenging cases you’ve worked on where your scientific expertise played a key role in the diagnosis?

Hayley Pincott answered on 12 Feb 2025:

Hi,

I feel my experience and building a set of skills rather than my knowledge has played a part in diagnosing a patients condition. I worked in Oral Pathology & Microbiology, we were the only unit in Wales that dealt with head and neck cancers so it made us very specialist in our field and this allowed me to develop particular skills and learn new techniques to cut thin slices of bone so we could put it on a slide, then stain it to look at under a microscope by a pathologist.

There was a case where we had a young patient, I had to keep leaving as I found it really upsetting to be dealing with a patient so young. There was another patient, a young adult who had not long finished university, and had to have his eye removed.

The worst part about my job is knowing that sometimes my best isn’t always good enough, and that a patient may never recover from their cancer diagnosis. However what I can do is consistently do my best to make sure the quality of my work is of a high enough standard that allows other to do their job easily. This makes is easier to give patients the information they need to make choices about their treatment.

Thank you for a very thought provoking question.