You meet so many people when you’re in hospital with your child. Who are they all? And what do they all do? In this series, we explore the roles you might come across in hospital and meet the humans behind them!
Hi, I’m Laura and I am a diagnostic radiographer; this means I spend my days x-raying or scanning patients to work towards a diagnosis. I primarily work in CT doing scans of people’s brains, bodies and hearts. But really, you can find radiographers everywhere in a hospital, in A&E, surgery, outpatient departments, wards and in procedures, taking images to guide and assist the doctors.
I have been working as a radiographer for 7 and I have been at Gloucestershire Hospitals since I graduated in 2018.
On a typical day I get involved with lots of “check-up” type scans, this will be monitoring whether an outpatients’ treatment is working and sending that information off to their doctors and specialist care teams. I also work with the wards and A&E performing any urgent scans that are needed for patients staying in the hospital.
Every day I will have a student to work with, and they will be studying to one day be a radiographer like me. Throughout a student’s training they will have to do practical assessments in the hospitals and when I work with students I enjoy helping them revise for these and later on completing these assessments.
To be a radiographer you need a degree, so I trained at UWE for three years studying diagnostic imaging. When I first graduated, I mostly just worked in x-ray, but then I trained in the cardiac cath labs, in a team of cardiac nurses, cardiology consultant taking live images during lifesaving procedures. I worked in this area for two years before starting training in CT scanning.
I’ve been doing CT for about 3 years and now have worked hard to do more technical scans involving taking pictures of people hearts.
In the past 6 months I’ve also started working in fluoroscopy, where I work with a doctor and an assistant taking snapshots and live images to look at how a person swallows when they have problems eating and drinking.
In terms of what makes a good radiographer I think the main two skills are being friendly and also having a good grasp of science. The way we see patients is much faster than regular nurses, doctors or physios so we have to get our patients to trust us quickly. I am pretty chatty day to day, and even though I have scanned hundreds and thousands of patients in my career I still get people recognise me from previous visits and thank me for helping them feel less stressed.
Having a good knowledge of science is important as a radiographer as we don’t just need to be good at biology and anatomy. We also have to understand physics, especially working with radiation, to get good quality pictures whilst keeping ourselves and our patients safe. A lot of our job is a delicate tightrope walk trying to balance using enough radiation to get good pictures, but not too much that we cause any harm.
I have a wanted to be a radiographer since I was 16, I was interested in a career in healthcare and would watch all the different staff when I would visit a friend in the children’s hospital. The fast-paced nature of the work and getting to use ever-changing technology really appealed to me as most other jobs struck me as a little bit too slow. It’s pretty interesting how new technology changes the way I can do my job, to get better quality images (similar to how phone cameras are improving), and to make the experience less stressful for patients.
I like the variety I get working as a radiographer. Some days I can be in x-ray, teaching students, other days I can be in CT scanning some of the most poorly patients in the hospital, others days I can be part of a big team doing a surgical procedure on a patient to treat their cancer.
I really enjoy the feeling of solving a puzzle, its satisfying when someone comes to see us, potentially quite anxious or in pain and we can work together to get the images we need. I love it when patients tell me I made the experience better than what they assumed it would be or when a student thanks me for teaching them something new.
Did you know that 90% of people that come to hospital will see a radiographer? I’d like for parents to know that scans and x-rays don’t hurt, and quite often the whole process is short and sweet and just like taking a school photo (psst: you just need to stay still).
You can see more blogs from our Hospital Humans series on our website. We also have loads of information to guide you through a stay in hospital with your child, all created by parents who have been in hospital with their child. From admittance to discharge and everything in between, we’ve got you covered.
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