Missing Image

Missing Image

Imagine this… You clock in to work and begin your day off as normal, you notice its going by rather smoothly. While out on portable exams, you get paged to do a routine portable chest x-ray on the patient in room 745. You immediately go to that patient’s room, without any known name or birthdate of that particular patient. As you converse with the patient and achieve a brief history, you begin the exam. After finishing you return to the department where another technologist indicates they accidently gave you the wrong patient room number. Without question you ignore the incident, and clear the images on the imaging plate then proceed to the correct patient room number and finish the images for the original x-ray order. As a radiologic technologist, one of the most important things to consider when dealing with ionizing radiation is reducing patient dose. Repeats are the main cause of patient dose, and unnecessary radiation to a patient is also another. In the example stated above, the radiologic technologist did not verify the room number with the other technologist giving the information. This led to unnecessary radiation exposure to the patient. Several ethical codes and rules were disregarded in this scenario.

According to the ARRT Standards of Ethics, “the Code of Ethics is aspirational” (American Registry of Radiologic Technologists, 2014, pg.1). This simply meaning technologists improving themselves to become even better than before. The previous scenario includes these ethical codes 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Ethical code 1 describes the technologist acting in a professional manner, and responding to the patient’s needs. In this scenario the technologist did not only fail to verify name and birthdate, but he or ...

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... gave the room number. The technologist that took the image should have acquired the name and birthdate of the patient instead of disregarding it.

In the healthcare field, many patients come and go.

Radiologic technologists are educated on the damaging effects of radiation; therefore, it is important for them to reduce patient dose as much as possible through communication. Lead shields are provided by the hospital that technologists use, but self-consciously a technologist should be aware of reducing patient dose through step by step processes. As medical professionals it is our obligation to verify name and birthdate of each patient, this simple step will reduce the number of unnecessary radiation exposures.

Works Cited

American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (2012.) Retrieved from https://www.arrt.org/pdfs/Governing-Documents/Standards-of-Ethics.pdf