Jason
Other hospitals typically don’t do that many portable X-rays. You have to have more skill to get the same-quality exam at bedside.
Jason put together his career in radiology at The University of Tennessee Medical Center from the inside out. Long before he ever took his first professional X-ray of a medical center patient, he was himself a patient here. The experience not only saved his life, it forever altered it.
“As I was going to the University of Tennessee to get my international business degree,” Jason explains, “I was diagnosed with cancer. I had 12 tumors in my lungs, besides the primary tumor in my hip. The initial prognosis was not very good.”
Fortunately, a year of extensive treatment at the medical center, including surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, put the cancer in remission. Jason returned to school, graduated and took a job with an import-export company, but something was missing.
“It didn’t feel right,” he says. “I know this sounds kind of crazy, but it didn’t feel like I was doing anything to help humanity. I was simply helping a company make more money.”
Friends Jason had made in medicine suggested that he consider a career in radiology. It indeed felt like the right thing to do. “I went to X-ray school right here at the medical center,” he says. The two-year program exposed him to different imaging technologies and taught him how X-ray technicians support diagnosis and treatment.
Jason, who now works the second shift as an operating room X-ray technician, notes that the medical center’s status as a Level I Trauma Center both requires and promotes radiological expertise that’s unmatched by other East Tennessee hospitals. For example, postoperative exams ordinarily performed in the X-ray department help surgeons confirm that their work has been successful.
As a Level I Trauma Center, the medical center’s trauma unit receives patients with multiple injuries who often go to surgery and then return to the trauma unit. This means that postoperative exams have to be done portably, where the patients are. “Other hospitals typically don’t do that many portable X-rays,” Jason notes. “You have to have more skill to get the same-quality exam at bedside.”
The medical center’s radiology department also is the only one in East Tennessee using a new type of PET/CT scan (see “Radiology’s Imaging Tools”)—the PET rubidium scan—to diagnose heart disease. The test takes less than half an hour, compared with the less advanced three-hour procedures used in its place at other centers.
Though accreditation from the American College of Radiology (ACR) is required only in mammography, the medical center holds ACR accreditation in MRI, CT, PET/CT and ultrasound imaging as well. Vanessa Bramble, the department’s director, says radiology is prepared to go the extra mile for patient care. “We see a little bit of everything,” she says, “and we’re committed to quality.” This dedication to excellence, combined with a wealth of experience, is what sets UT Medical Center apart from other Knoxville hospitals.
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X-Ray Technician