Video Transcript

Host:
Question: Are there different job titles for X-ray tech? I feel like I’ve heard medical imaging specialist, technologist instead of technician. Is there a proper title or is there a reason? Maybe I’ve heard so many different titles for what I assume is essentially the same umbrella term for the same job in a lot of different areas.

Jennifer:
Answer: The actual term would be Radiologic Technologists. Radiology, though, is a big umbrella for X-ray cat scan, MRI, mammal ultrasound. You would probably think of the word tech because a lot of times it gets shortened to like, I’m an X-ray tech and a technologist and a technician is that I actually was required to go to school to do what I am doing. Our governing board, which is the ARRT, the American Registry of Radiologic technologists, have now changed the requirements where you associates degree to the registry board. Before it was a certificate program, but you still have to complete the program before you could even sit for it. A technician is someone who can just train, trained on the job and has a limited set of skills. But we’ve actually gone to school to study exactly what we are doing.

Farrel:
Answer: The radiologic technologist is the bare bones basic or X-ray technologist at the people in the field don’t really care for the word technician because we don’t feel like it reflects the amount of knowledge that we have to have to do what we have to do. I know we have an ongoing feud with nursing where they call us button pushers. It’s kind of fun. So yeah, there’s X-ray tech, X-ray technologist, rad tech, Radiologic Technologists. So basically anything that says tech in radiology world is going to be technologists. So they have CT techs and MRI techs and ultrasound techs and nuclear medicine techs.

Jenna:
Answer: The appropriate term that set forth by the American Registry is Radiologic Technologists. That’s the ARRT that we get our credentialing from, as well as the American Society of radiologic technology or the CRT is Radiologic Technologists. So through the ARRT, you ever see that little t in parentheses after an x vertex name that stands for radiologic technologist for short, a lot of other imaging modalities will just call us X-ray techs just as short little nickname, because that’s what we do. We take x-rays. And so that term was coined.