Video Transcript

Host:
Question: What does an X-ray technician actually do, which I know is a kind of a big, broad question, but if you could give me a high level overview or standard job description, so to speak.

Jennifer:
Answer: Overall, every X-ray technologist takes X-rays for a diagnostic reason, so a patient will come in if it’s an outpatient. They come in, say, to have the chest X-ray. There’s always a diagnosis reason. So say you’re coming in for a call. So I’m going to bring the patient in. I’m going to ask their name. When asked or date of birth. Verify the person, verify the studies going, and then we’re going to perform the exam. My job is technologists to make sure that I position the patient properly and then I step on the wall and I take the exposure. I need to make sure, though, that my exposure technique is in the proper range so that the picture comes up a good looking picture so that the radiologist, who’s the doctor, can do their job, which is reading the X-ray and providing the information that they see in it. So they’ll be addressing reasons for calls and things like that. They’ll be looking at the lungs, they’d be looking at the heart. All that in a hospital, you would see more than just outpatients. You would see in patients, you might work in the emergency room X-ray technologist also to go to the operating room, which I’m sure not many people know. There are cases in the operating room that require to have X-rays taken, whether it’s a machine called a, c, r. Also, you would be doing portable X-rays within a hospital as well. So some patients who might not be able to travel to the Department that have X-rays done, you might be taking your portable X-ray machine to the room and performing exams in the room.

Farrel:
Answer: Well, it is your job to do breast imaging on every patient and with the idea in the back of your head to not miss anything because we’re talking about breast cancer and breast cancer prevention. So it’s high stakes. I guess it’s your job to provide education to your patients also. So it’s not just get you and take pictures, get out. Like we talk about a lot of things like statistics and hormone use and there’s just all kinds of things and there’s a lot of misunderstandings about what we do and how it feels and what the images look like. And so I’m a big proponent for educating people, as well as making them comfortable and taking great images for radiologists to see what they need to see and hopefully catch something if it’s there early.

Jenna:
Answer: As a radiologic technologist, the primary role is that we’re going to be taking diagnostic medical images for our patients. So we’re going to check to make sure that the diagnosis is matching the patient’s symptoms and pretty much any bone structure in the body. We’re able to take an X-ray out to create a diagnosis to help treat that patient in the hospital setting. We’re also going to be wearing many hats, so we might have to transport our patients. A lot of patient care is involved, so we’re going to make sure that our patients are comfortable. There’s also a lot of procedure type exams that we do in this field where contrast may have to be administered. So it also might entail preparation of contrast, sterile tray, adhering to sterile technique and assisting our radiologists. So kind of a good mix of stuff. But the primary is to create diagnostic medical images for our patients.