With a growing global population and a universal expectation of longer, more active lives, the technology that promotes health and wellbeing has become ubiquitous. Healthcare is increasingly dependent on technology, and the safe, effective advance of this technology depends on the work of biomedical engineers. Biomedical engineering embraces devices for neonatal care at one end of life to the independent living aids for older people at the other. Such engineering developments are reducing costs and improving performance across the whole healthcare sector. Yet the presence and significance of biomedical engineering within NHS hospitals is often unclear, inadequately recognised and poorly understood.