The medical radiographer, also referred to as a radiographic technologist, is a highly specialized health care professional who works closely with radiologists. Thomas Wolfe, Medical Radiography Chair, welcomes all students who desire to become experienced radiographic technologists who are able to advance to management positions within the diagnostic imaging department or hospital. Other advancement opportunities include teaching, technical sales, research, interventional radiology, MRI, CT, mammography, and quality management.
Medical Radiography
Hello, I'm Tom Wolfe. I am the Program Chair of the Medical Radiography program here at Baptist Health Sciences University. I'm standing in one of our X-ray labs here. This is an X-ray tube, probably looks familiar to those of you that have hurt yourself and gone to the emergency room. Or you may have gone to an Orthopedic Clinic as well. This is the basis of our program medical radiography. The mission of our program is to prepare you to be a diagnostic radiographer. After you graduate from our program and pass the certification exam offered by the American registry of radiologic technologists, you'll be eligible to work in 49 states. California is the only state that requires an additional exam to get an X-ray license. If you follow the rules and the practices of professional X-ray is a safe profession, and is safe for the patients as well. It is not a good idea to be constantly exposed to X-rays. So we practice on these things that we call phantoms. We never practice on each other. We never take x-rays of each other no matter how tempting that might be. Beyond the traditional x rays we do, radiography encompasses a whole lot of different areas. You've probably heard about MRI and CT. I've bet you've seen fluoroscopy on television, very popular television shows. They have the doctor showing on the monitor what they're looking at inside the patient. You can also work in mammography, cardiac cath lab, other invasive procedures. There's a lot of different things that you can do with an X-ray education. If you decide for various reasons to move out of the clinical area, you can go into things like sales, applications, management or education. And one of the great things about the profession is offers a big variety of work environments. Many different places you can work from the emergency room at the med, to a sports MRI clinic, totally different environments, what's happening there. We have quite a few orthopedic clinics in town that hire.
So it's not just hospitals, women's imaging, general medical clinics, GI labs, urology, clinics, neat texts as well. There's even places in town you can get a job doing mobile radiography, where you take the X-ray machine into a little van or little SUV, and you drive up to nursing homes and other facilities to take pictures there. So x-ray encompasses a lot more than just this cool machine right here. Now the radiography program at Baptist Health Science University is unique. In this area, we offer a baccalaureate degree a BHS in Medical Radiography. So right off the bat that gives you an advantage, you don't have to go back later to get a baccalaureate degree. We want you to be a well-rounded individual with critical thinking skills. So you have about two years of general education. Although our general education courses here skewed towards health care. When you take anatomy and physiology at BHS-- they look at the body from the perspective of someone who's going to do healthcare. Our sociology courses are in medical sociology, and many of our other courses incorporate medical healthcare and ethics into the curriculum. Here at Baptist Health Sciences University, we use the trimester system. So the professional portion of the radiography program is six trimesters, you'd start in the summer of what would be your sophomore year, if you're following the normal four year track. After that you go through your professional courses.
Admission to the university is not admission into the radiography program. The radiography program accepts 20 students per year-- We may have a few more that apply. But generally, if you come in and do a good job, you're going to get into the program. We use a competency based system. What we do is we teach you from the book, each exam, and then we use these phantoms to practice. And you will practice on each other, once in being the patient, once you've been a technologist. And you will practice but not ever take pictures of each other. For most of the program, you're in clinic three days a week. Three full days a week getting lots and lots of hands on practice. The other two days we have, you know be on campus during classes. It's a fairly full schedule. But if you put your mind to it, you can do it. You need to know that this is not the kind of thing you do as a sideline or hobby. It takes a major commitment. That becomes your life for two years. It's not necessarily hard, but it is time consuming. You have to be in a position in your life that you can handle spending this much time on one thing.
We have over 20 clinical rotations. For each clinical rotation, you go there for four or five weeks. Obviously you're not going to get to all those make sure everybody goes to a big hospital. They all go to an ortho clinic. We also go to a small clinic to give you some idea of the different types of work environments. As to academics, one of the things that makes us unique is we offer you educational classes and CT and MRI. These courses meet the structured educational requirements, ARRT. You'll be able to sit for those exams as soon as you meet the clinical requirements. In order to sit through MRI and CT exams, you're required to have additional education in those areas. The other programs in town don't meet that qualification. So if you want to go on and get your CT certification, through ARRT, you're going to have to take time and pay to take additional classes after you graduate. When you graduate with us, you've already met that qualification. Depending on where you work, what modality you work, and what shift you work, you're looking at probably making 45 to $60,000 a year upon graduation. Profession requires someone who's interested in technology, science, anatomy, but ultimately, this is a patient care profession. So we want people that are interested in helping people. A good technologist is a good person that doesn't view the patient as an exam to be done. We try to address our patients by name, and not by one exam to having done. Mr. Jones is not the myelogram. It's a great profession and this is a wonderful program. I have two awesome colleagues at teach with me that the students love. I hope to see you here, Baptist Health Sciences University. It's a great university and a great profession.
Panoramic video playback may work incorrectly in your browser