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In radiotherapy, the job of a Clinical Scientist is to ensure that the treatment prescribed by the patient’s doctor (a Clinical Oncologist) is as good as it can be. Apart from in a few special cases we don’t actually treat the patient, that’s the job of a Radiographer, but we’re involved in everything in between. For example:

Planning the treatments so the correct amount of radiation goes to the cancer, but carefully avoids all the other bits of your body
Checking the machines that deliver radiation (‘linacs’) which cost £1-2 million pounds are actually working as they should
Maintaining all the different computer systems in the department
Introducing newer techniques to do step 1 even better!

There’s lots more – message me if you want even more details!

Radiotherapy is a very precise branch of medicine, which is important as using too little radiation will mean a cancer isn’t properly treated and the patient may not be cured, but giving too much may harm the patient in other ways. A lot of my time in radiotherapy is spent working out the best way to treat a particular cancer. We do this by using computer simulation software to try different ways of using the linac, using the CT scan we have of a patient.
Follow the link and have a go yourself! Click on radiotherapy and see if you can treat the patient successfully (don’t worry if you don’t get it right first time, this is exactly how we develop our plans for real)  http://www.insidestory.iop.org/insidestory_flash1.html
We have a huge number of different checks that we do on the machines used in radiotherapy (‘linacs’), and they have to be done in a way that minimises the impact on the patient, so we do some checks in the morning before treatments begin. As an example, As an example, we quite often have earlyish starts (7:30-8) to check the calibration of one of our machines. This involves measuring the amount of radiation produced by the machine to very high precision, and changing it if needed.
Much, much more!