hi everybody i'm sally i have been working as a radiographer in melbourne for the last
six years sometimes i will get messages on facebook or instagram
people ask me what is it like to be a radiographer in australia so i thought i
would make some videos answering the questions but if you have any more questions please feel
free to leave them in the comment section down below and i'm more than happy to answer them
radiographers are not well represented in the media in movies or tv shows you always see the
doctors or the nurses doing the x-ray or ct scans but in reality radiographers are the
only qualified people who are allowed to perform x-ray and ct examinations these are our areas
and even if you see a radiographer on a tv show that person is portrayed as a creepy person
working in a dark room who just pushes buttons don't know who they are don't want to know how
they're doing just want to go click click and get them out of here but we are more
than that there is a really good japanese comic / tv show called radiation house
all of the pathologies examinations and equipment were very accurately presented
so if you like to find out more about the work of a radiographer i would highly recommend you
to read the comic or watch the tv shows a lot of people have no idea what radiographers do
when i tell people that i'm a radiographer some people think that i work on a radio station so i
explained to them that i am a photographer who uses radiation and when the patients ask me oh
can you tell me there's a fracture i'll be like i'm a photographer i take the photo but i cannot
tell you what's in the photo and radiographers are also referred as medical imaging technologist
and if you're trained in ultrasound you also call yourself a sonographer so hopefully by the end of
the video you will learn more about the world of radiography and you can decide if radiographer
is a career for you anyway we will start with some personal questions why did you become a
radiographer well i didn't have that many options i was on a student visa and i would love to live
and work in australia so there were only several options for me to choose from if i want to apply
for the permanent residency i knew i wanted to work in healthcare so i was choosing between
physiotherapy or radiography my family told me to choose radiography because they thought that
physiotherapy is too much physical work for me but they were wrong so in radiography there's
a lot of physical manual work imagine you have an unconscious trauma patient on an emergency trolley
and you need to move that patient across onto the x-ray table to take some x-rays and then you have
to move the patient's body the arms and the legs to take x-rays from different angles to show the
fractures it is a lot of physical work so if you think that once you become a radiographer
you just get to stand behind the screen and to push the button it is not that easy the other
reason i chose radiography is that i find it very interesting that you can see inside the patient's
body without cutting that person open it's almost like magic do you love your job i love my job
now i kind of have to emphasize on the world now because after working there for six years
i knew this is a career for me and i would love to work there until the end of my career
but at the start of my career i did not have the luxury to ask myself
if i love it or not because i wanted to apply for the permanent residency and i need to stay
in the job for at least two years so in a way i did not question myself if i like it or not
i just have to do it after i got my permanent residency i did question myself if i want to
stay in this career for the long term there is up and down sometimes you don't feel appreciated
as a radiographer because people think that your job is very easy you just push the button
and sometimes you don't get the respect from the doctors but after a while as i learned more about
my job i found purpose in my work and i really enjoy it and if i could do it all over again i
would still go down this path would you recommend radiography to someone else it depends on their
personality and it depends on their situation if you want to become a doctor but you couldn't
get in because of the score of whatever reason and you choose radiography as your second best
that's not a good option and the other thing is before people get into radiography
i think they need to have a reality check and they need to find out exactly what a job is involved
because some people thought that maybe after you finish radiography you can study master and become
a doctor because in nursing you can progress and become a nurse practitioner which allow you to
order x-ray and make diagnosis but in radiography you don't have that pathway in australia i know in
england some radiographer can do x-ray reporting but in australia red dot system is not that common
what kind of people are suitable for a career in radiography i would say people who are hard
working and have a attention to detail so as i mentioned before there's a lot of physical work in
radiography and as a radiographer you do do shift works so that means you could be working overnight
you'll be on call on the weekend if you get a call at 2 am you have to go back to the hospital and do
that ct scan you just have to do it and you also need attention to detail because sometimes the
small thing on the x-ray may be pathology and the pathology may be covered by other anatomy
so you really need to focus on that picture and to make sure you have given the doctor your best shot
to show the patient's problem they say picture can paint a thousand words just like an x-ray or a ct
scan or an mri scan it shows you exactly what the problem the patients have what are your favorite
things about the job i would say patience and art the patients do make your day better because now
that i'm in mri i see a lot of oncology patients so sometimes i see them every three months
every six months or maybe every year and when you see them again and you see their health improve
it really give you that rewarding feeling because you're part of their recovery plan as well and you
there to monitor their progress so it is amazing to see them getting better and the patients who
remember you and you want to make their skin as comfortable as possible and they do appreciate
it and the other thing i say about art is that when you take an x-ray when you do an mri scan
your name is on the scan so you have to take pride in your work when you produce an x-ray you have to
be proud of it you the x-ray have to show the pathology and they have to be good positioning