A Southampton Solent University student is set to graduate with two jobs already secured, one in the Ambulance Service and one providing trauma simulation training for the British Army.
BA (Hons) Prosthetics and Special Effects Design finalist Katie Upton has spent the past year building a career in one of the most specialized and specialized areas of her industry.
Her specialty is moulage, the practice of creating realistic simulated wounds and injuries for medical training. It is widely used in healthcare professional training, but Katie discovered that it was being done informally in many UK ambulance services.
I contacted about 50 different companies for work experience. she says. “It’s a very specialist area so I didn’t think many would respond. But I was very lucky to hear from the South East Coast Ambulance Service, the London Ambulance Service, the Royal College of Surgeons and the major trauma hospitals in London.”
When it came to choosing where to study, Katie says Solent stood out. The course’s emphasis on practice-led learning appealed to her, and the city campus felt familiar to someone who had grown up in London.
A sophomore unit on professional application prompted her to think seriously about what kind of artist she wanted to be. She knew she was drawn to realism, the grim and forensic end of art, but she hadn’t yet found a field where that could be a career in its own right.
It pushed us all to really get into the industry. I was quite quiet, I didn’t trust myself. But then I did the work experience and thought: this is not as scary as it seems.”
Katie Upton, BA (Hons) Prosthetics and Special Effects Design Final Student, Southampton Solent University
He spent the summer between his second and third year gaining work experience, teaching paramedics and doctors about best practice, attending training days and demonstrating what a professionally constructed wound could do for the effectiveness of emergency simulations.
The ambulance services she worked with noticed the difference and asked her to come back as a paid professional.
The military side of her career came about through a similar outreach process. She was initially told that security requirements made it impossible to undertake her work experience, but several months later she received a phone call offering her a paid position.
He visited an army base in Cambridge for a day of training and has since become part of a team working on large-scale simulations of combat trauma. Some of the actors he works with are amputees. Her job is to create prosthetic limbs and realistic injuries that help train military personnel to recognize when and how medical intervention is needed.
“We make fake limbs. If someone’s whole arm is supposed to be amputated, we make their whole arm.” she explains. “We make the end of it look like it’s ripped. Sometimes we’re out on the field for four or five hours.”
The job takes her to bases across the UK and abroad and can last anywhere from a day to a month.
For Katie, the project also has a personal meaning. Her mother is a director of midwifery and deputy chief nurse for the NHS, while her father served in the army from the age of sixteen to twenty-seven.
BA (Hons) Prosthetics and Special Effects Design at Solent combines creative practice with professional application, preparing students for careers in film, television, theater and industries far beyond.
By placing employability, adaptability and real-world experience at the heart of every degree, Southampton Solent University is at the forefront of a new model of higher education that puts students.
