Video Transcript

Host:
Is there a kind of standard shift time? Could those be all over the place when you’re starting and stopping? And then how much of your day is each of those duties taking up?

Jenna:
Technologist schedules are usually about an eight hour schedule. Some places do do 12 hours for x ray, especially if you’re working in a hospital. X-ray is all over the place in the hospital. So there’s so many different technologies that are needed that the schedules usually vary. Like some people might come in at 6:00 AM and start doing portable X-rays in a hospital. There’s techs who come in at 8:00 because they’re there to do the outpatients. That’s basically your whole day, especially if you’re in the outpatient, you know, either a center, in an outpatient center or in the hospital. Patients are constantly coming in and getting registered. You’re notified that they’re there. They might actually have an appointment. Some days can be really busy. Some days could not be.

Farrel:
An average workday. We usually start patients about 7:30 in the morning, go till 4:30 or five, just depends on when people decide they want to come in. So you get in the morning, you start machines and make sure everything’s functioning correctly and then you go through the list and make sure every patient has priors or you have access Two priors that you’re doing the correct exam on the correct patient. And you know, if it’s follow up imaging, we make sure that we have that report from the radiologist that we’re taking the correct views. It’s a lot of fact checking and making sure that we’re doing the right thing all the time.

We see maybe 25, 30 patients a day at one facility. The other one will get up to 60 a day, which is a lot. And then in between just doing regular screening exams, we will also do biopsies as well. And we have some pretty high tech biopsy machinery there too that we will do. And follow up imaging happens a lot as well. So it’s not all the same thing all the time.

Jenna:
That’s going to really vary based on your work settings. So if you’re in the hospital setting versus an outpatient or doctor’s office setting, I’ve worked in all of them. And they’re all very different. So the hospital setting, that’s going to be pretty busy because we have our ER patients, inpatients, outpatients. So you’re kind of on the go and you’re not working alone. You have a team that you’re working with and everyone kind of puts in their share. So really just depending on the type of exams that are ordered, whether you’re doing procedures, those are lengthy or so.

You’re going to see less patients overall in a day, but you’re going to be kind of on your feet more because the procedures can last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, sometimes more, if it requires subsequent x-rays to be taken. But if you’re just doing portables, you can go knock out 10 patients and a half hour to an hour, depending on X-rays. You’re doing portables. So that would be kind of your hospital setting where you’re going to be more busy. There’s not really going to be a time that you’re stopping and sitting down unless maybe you’re working overnight and it’s quieter in the outpatient setting. Same thing.

You’re going to have a schedule with a bunch of patients that are scheduled back to back. So those are usually quick, short and sweet. Not really too many procedures unless, again, you’re working somewhere that does that. If you’re like in an orthopedic office, you’re not going to really have any procedure. So you’re just going to be doing still playing radiographs X-rays. And you can have a lot of patients that can be busy. People drop off your schedule, you might have a moment to breathe, but it’s really an on the go type of field. So it’s nice if you don’t like that desk job and you like to really get that interaction and stay busy.