Video Transcript

Host:
Question: What would be your standard duties as an X-ray tack day to day?

Jennifer:
Answer: Standard duties would be getting a patient, seeing them going over the order, performing the x-ray, reviewing the picture, make sure that it looks OK for the radiologist to be able to do their job. You would send a x-rays through, take the patient out and then come back. Review your image on the image archiving system, which is called pacs, leaving out the study in the ordering system. So that radiologists at that point, once you’ve reviewed it and the archiving system closed out the study on the ordering system, the radiologist can then do their job. And then beyond just x ray, I mean, you’re in charge of making sure that your equipment’s clean, your room is clean, your room stops, and then you might be going to relieve another technologist somewhere, maybe take lunch or something like that.

Farrel:
Answer: The responsibility every day is to update your patient’s history. You have to greet them, get them changed, talk about their health history, their hormone history, their surgical history, any cancer history in the family, and just get a lot of information from each patient and then provide the education if you need to. And then we will go ahead and do the exam, which is usually if it’s a regular screening exam, it’s just two images of each breast and educating my patients on what we need to see, how I need to position them, and then telling them what’s going on as we do it. Doing two images on each side and making sure at the end that we have good imaging, making sure they don’t have any questions, locking them out. There’s a background to all these appointments as well, which requires some office work. So we do a lot of checking for prior imaging from other facilities. If they’re available, we send out reminder letters, we make phone calls, we do all kinds of stuff just to make sure everybody gets in and gets what they need done.

Jenna:
Answer: Communication with nurses on the floor in the hospital and other imaging departments. So we want to try to avoid our patients having to come down from the floor multiple times. So we’re going to check their prior history. We’re going to check to see if any other exams have been ordered so that we can communicate with our other imaging departments in the radiography department so that this patient can schedule their exams back to back and not have to be brought back and forth. Also, if it’s an exam that they have to be npo, we’re communicating a lot with our nurse to make sure that patient is npo, if it’s like a procedure that requires that. And then again, just taking of the images. So we’re trained to make sure that the dose is appropriate. So we’re not overly radiating our patients in order to create those diagnostic images.