Work Experience

2005-01-14 at 9:53 p.m.

I turned up at The London Clinic at 9:30 this morning. Now before I go any further I should say that it is a beautiful hospital (carpets! plants! polished floors! nice coffee!) and that all the staff I met were very friendly and pleasant. The problem I had was not remotely with the hospital or its staff but the job itself.

You see, I don't know now whether I'm going to like radiography. Which I suppose was the point of doing work experience in any case but it is still rather worrying.

First off I saw three X-rays being done. Now this is obviously the bread-and-butter of the radiography profession, the thing you do most often. It requires no skill that I could see. In order to calculate the amount of radiation they're going to pump into someone, they use a touch-screen computer pad. They press, say, "wrist", and the computer calculates everything necessary for a good picture and does it for them. All they have to do is make sure the patient stands still. In other words, about as technically difficult as operating a photocopier. Now this does not appeal.

The radiography course is a three-year degree for which I am tearing my guts out doing physics. I do not want to get to the end of that and just be pressing "go" all the time. I want to be skilled and using those skills. I want to be challenged, to have responsibility and have to learn new things. I don't want to be a glorified button-pusher whose job could be done by someone with far less qualifications and indeed, in many instances (radiography assistants and people with general health degrees) is. It was also a very slow day in the hospital and I spent long times sitting about doing nothing - something I always hate intensely.

I think I may also have a problem with authority. Not that I mind other people being in charge, but I do mind being a drudge. I am not unintelligent, and I am well-educated and I have come to realise that a job without any autonomy, simply a "do this, do that" kind of job will be intolerable to me. and what I have come to see is that radiography may be just such a job - I knew that radiographers may not diagnose, but I had failed to appreciate just how much they take their orders from others. All I saw was doctors saying, do that scan, do this that way, put this much contrast on...do this, do that, it was the radiologist who had the interesting job, the radiographer did not have the liberty to make her own decisions. And that would be something I would find hard, though I suppose on the plus side you could never be to blame for anything.

I did see some things of interest though - I got to watch an angiogram, while wearing one of those lead dress things to stop myself being too irradiated. Those are where they stick a catheter up an artery and pump in stuff that makes x-rays work. Then the radiographer adjusts how much of the potion goes in and takes the pictures. That was interesting and actually seemed to require the radiographer to use their skills. However the radiographer doing that was rather senior, and I don't fancy waiting twenty years to do the interesting stuff, plus she was still just doing what the radiologist said - never offering her own opinion for instance.

I don't know. I'm in something of a quandary and I don't know what to do about it. I shall go to the interviews and continue on as normal while I'm thinking about it. However I now more than ever need to go to an NHS hospital for work experience to see whether the everyday work is always like that. If it is I must rethink what I'm going to do, and perhaps look at nursing or something instead.

So, an informative if not exactly pleasing day.

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