Medical Imaging

Medical imaging is the use of x-rays to produce images of a patient’s body for diagnostic purposes. So a radiographer is the person who acquires the images, so they need to put patient in position relative to the equipment and set the equipment up and optimize the parameters to produce images that produce the best way of being able to visualise the patient’s anatomy and what’s going on inside of the patient in order to facilitate a diagnosis.

For students who graduate from this course, the opportunities are really excellent because right now there’s a shortage of radiographers across Australia and that’s been the last couple of years and is expected to keep on for another few years because of the growing age population and because the credentials that students get from graduating from this course are national credentials you can work anywhere in the country and also many places overseas.

Year one is what we consider foundation knowledge, we’re laying the foundation of the core anatomy, physiology,  science that you need and introducing core skills and medical imaging getting students into the lab using the x-ray equipment, learning how to talk to patients, how to be part of the healthcare team, all the basics in year one.

Year two gets into the lab a lot in developing the technical skills as well as the knowledge base to prepare you for clinical placements. Clinical placements start in year two and we interweave clinical placements with theory terms so that students learn basic techniques, go out and practice it in clinical, come back and learn more advanced techniques and go out in placement and put those into practice in clinical, so by the time you finish year four, you’ve completed five placements to get about 50 weeks of hands-on experience in the clinical environment, which means you’re really job ready by the time you finish the course.

You actually complete the degree in three and almost a little under four instead of a full four year degree, so that you enter the job market three months earlier than most of the graduates at other universities.

I think for me over and over what I experienced and loved about medical imaging in being able to harness technology but also know that I was doing something meaningful for that patient and that’s a good thing to feel, every day, day in, the day out, that you are making a difference in some ways.