I am in the midst of my 3rd clinical rotation, which is at a very busy ortho clinic. We have in-house doctors whose scheduled patients need x-rays, as well as walk ins from urgent care and other offices.
It is my 1st time doing ortho like this. I already am pretty certain that I highly prefer trauma/hospital radiography to ortho. I LOVED my hospital rotation. At this rotation, I'm learning how to really zero in on fine details to meet the standards of the ortho docs. And that's fantastic, and cool to learn.
BUT... I feel like I am really slow compared to the techs working there. Even if I do something we see over and over, like a foot or an ankle, I feel like they are getting impatient with me. I do sometimes run back before exposing to double check some detail like my marker or some detail I know I have forgotten in the past. I will be taking all the exams for a while and feel like I am churning them out, but then find out we are behind, and then the other techs take over to catch up.
Other exams, I'm just plain SLOW because I have not had enough repetition and practice.
I have been told to trust myself more and stop double checking everything... but there are times when I do fix something that otherwise would have resulted in a repeat. I'm feeling like they are annoyed with me, but maybe that is in my head. I definitely don't want to be the reason they are behind and doctors are waiting on images.
Sometimes I do realize I took longer than necessary, but I also see myself getting through simple exams in under 5 minutes (sometimes much quicker!!), more and more often. But exams I have only done a couple of times, I know I'm too slow.
1 tech at my last rotation kept telling me to multitask more, such as start positioning the patient while taking history. Sometimes that works. But yesterday I tried to do that and, in my rush, missed the fact that my patient was pretty shaky. Then we had a motion artifact and I had to move the exam from the wall bucky to the table and repeat the 1st image. I could have actually saved time by just not rushing her through it.
In general, when I start to rush, this little panic thing starts in my head, then I make mistakes and miss details. And I do think a repeat wastes more time in most cases. Not to mention the extra exposure, of course.
My questions are...
At this point in my clinical education, does it look really bad for a student to be slower than an experienced tech? Or is it to be expected?
More importantly to me... please, please, techs, share any tips at all you have for making your exams go more quickly... even if it seems common knowledge or I already know it... but I admit that I am hoping some of you will have some clever tricks, things you do to streamline your process.
Thanks in advance, sorry if it was rambly and also a bit of a vent.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Radiology/comments/y7cf9f/2nd_year_rt_student_how_can_i_increase_my_speed/
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