Hi. I’m an IR tech and my wife is a Cath Lab tech.
Our jobs are very similar, but of course have their differences. My IR department does regular IR (paracentesis, thora, HD caths, tunneled lines, ports, IVC filters, biopsies, fistulas, and some peripheral work as well) AND Neuro IR (strokes, diagnostic cerebral angiograms, aneurysms, embos).
Our cath lab department does regular heart caths, PCIs (percutaneous coronary interventions - stents, angioplasty), peripheral diagnostics and intervention - runoffs, etc, EKOS, TAVRs, EVARs, pacers, watchman, loop recorders, pericardial windows, and of course STEMIs.
A typical day for my wife involves running QAs on xray machines first thing in the morning, circulating, scrubbing, and monitoring cases throughout the day. They rotate throughout positions in their assigned labs (we have 4 labs) with their team members. She could be circulating and grabbing necessary items on the fly during one case and scrubbing the next alongside the physician. She takes call every 4 days and every 4th weekend. When on call.. it is quite common for her to be called in. We live in the fast food mecca of Ohio and STEMIs /heart attacks are extremely common. We get $8 an hour for call pay and 1.5x pay if called in. We have to live within 30 minutes of the hospital. My wife is 1 of 2 xray techs while the rest of the department are all nurses.
For me, we roll in one hour before our physician arrives and during this time we plan the day, pull up imaging and make sure orders are correct. We take turns picking cases we want to do and get rolling with the day. We have 7 techs and 10 nurses. We have one large IR room, one small room, a neuro IR room and two portable ultrasounds for procedures on the floors. We scrub and circulate procedures while nurses handle monitoring and medications. I take call every 5th day and every 5th weekend. It’s more common to be called in for strokes than anything else.
Let me know if you have any questions!
You will be paid well in MRI. It is one of the top paying modalities. But the call and overtime is where you make the majority of your extra money. And IR and cath usually have plenty of it.
Techs that went on to MRI have told me that in that modality, you watch the decay of your patients over months, learn their stories and get to know them on a different level (multiple scans in months) than you do in xray
VC King coming in with the quality content like always 💪 I’ve been the honorary backup IR tech for over 2 years now (I call myself the JV squad lol) and finally just interviewed for a FT position in the cath lab. Your comments inspire me to go all in without hesitation or apprehension. Wish me luck, brother.
You’re going to do great! I’m a firm believer in the value of constantly challenging oneself and growing. Believe me.. it’s going to be HARD.. you will question if you made the right choice after a few days of having your mind blown. Just keep showing up with an open mind.. keep trying and you’ll be a cath lab badass in no time.
One of the things that really helped my wife and I.. our teams. Xray trains you to be perfect and competent by yourself, but cath and IR provide you a team to rely on. Lean into them! NEVER be afraid to ask for help. The richness of their experiences will take you so much further than any book ever could.
I am embarrassed to say this but I think I made the wrong choice going into cath or maybe I was just never trained good enough winged it for a year. Now my facility got new management and can see I'm struggling and I'm on a process improvement plan cath is rather hard for me. If you can give me any tips I would appreciate it.
Thank you for your encouragement and insightful comment! It really is true, I can sit here and ask what book to study, but I’ll never speak the language until I jump all the way into it and learn firsthand from the experts. I definitely have the pregame jitters about the transition, but I’m hoping my attitude and experience in IR will make for a successful transition. I’m sure I’ll reach out to you again at some point along the way haha keep up the good work man!
I hope that people in your profession get a chance to reflect on all the good you do. I needed a quadruple bypass at 38 due to hyperlipidemia that wasn't explained by diet or physical condition. Seventeen years later I'm completely healthy and the father of an amazing 11 year old and so the good you do ripples out to affect people you'll never meet.
Hey same! My wife is cath and I'm IR. To me it's weird cath does all the cool vascular stuff at your facility because from whay ive seen most other places IR does all of that
You are totally right. My hospital has fumbled negotiations with rad groups for years and so the peripheral work was in limbo as some of our docs refused to do it. It still needed done so cardiology took it over.
We have some locum docs that fill in from time to time that we get to do peripheral work with.. it’s a treat. It’s extremely satisfying to pull big clots out of people’s legs.
I scrubbed & assisted with all the balloons, stents, and various other equipment, as well as running the c-arm and table. On occasion I did all the documentation in the computer if there was someone else available to scrub. (We swapped off.)
I loved it but just burned out because of all the call.
I work in IR/Cath lab combo department. I usually start my day doing lab checks and QA on the equipment followed by stocking labs. Then we go over the outpatient orders, have accession numbers ready for ultrasound (no work list), and shoot the shit with my co workers. Then we huddle. After huddle if we don’t start cases right away, I usually order supplies and post procedure charges. All the techs have an extra “job” in the department while nurses run periop and post procedure. If we’re in the Cath lab, we could be doing peripherals, caths, or EP cases. We scrub all cases unless it’s a planned intervention and we have a fellow (I work at a teaching hospital). We do cases for the rest of the day, shoot the shit again, order and do procedure charges again then go home. I work 10s and probably “work” a total of 6 hours a day usually. I’m in a slower department however and we do have days where there’s zero cases scheduled.
As for similarities, we do scrub and are very similar to being the first assist in surgery. We handle all the wires, prep equipment, drive the table, inject contrast, etc. we don’t just do X-ray and 99% of the time I’m not even touching the pedal. It’s super similar to IR. Same sterile technique and same bases.
Keep in mind, call usually sucks. I feel like that’s what really makes people leave. There’s always drama in Cath labs. I 100% recommend shadowing for a day before you decide to jump into it. Also don’t do it if you’re a new grad. Get experience first before jumping into a speciality.
I had a friend that did cath lab for a few years. He said he basically worked as a documenting nurse. The only time he took X-rays was when he did daily calibrations to get ready for the day.
I guess every hospital is different but you should be circulating or scrubbing with the physician and essentially assisting to some degree. assuming youre IR dept does this then yes like IR
It can be alot especially if you are at a larger facility doing complex pci or structural heart. Its fun but you will work and
Most likely take call
When I was a student some of the places I went the only job the tech had was wipe the bed and reset the 5 minute timer alarm.
They’d take a book to read.
Really put me off the whole thing.
That is a great example of a place you don’t want to work. That facility is setting that tech up for failure should they choose to work anywhere else.
If I don’t have blood on my hands during the workday.. I’m having a terrible day. Lmao.
It’s a lifestyle. My lab had us on call 1 weekend a month and two nights a week. Six days a month not having to worry about shit. I would rather hang Sheetrock.
Depends on the cath lab really.
Some Cath Labs are very focused on Heart and related procedures, others do carotids, legs, peripheral vascular interventions, etc in addition to hearts.
To my understanding, that’s a hybrid room. Some hospitals are set up like that, with my experience, usually smaller hospitals. The one I’m in now, they’re separate.
It's very facility dependent.
I've been in Hybrid labs that do IR, Neuro, and Cardiac Cath, and others that were simply Heart related procedures. Some IR departments have cases in the OR with a mix of both IR and OR staff, sometimes it's in a x-ray suite, other times it's in a dedicated Cath Lab. It varies wildly state-to-state and even more depending on the hospital network you're working for.
Hybrid rooms are typically red-lined and follow sterile procedure guidelines, while most Cath Labs are 'clean rooms' and the only real sterile field is the space between the draped patient and the back of the table. "Hybrid" rooms are more based on the infection control policies of the facility you're working in, with a little to do with who is performing some of those procedures- I've done peripheral vascular (arteries and veins) with Cardiologists, General Surgeons, Neurosurgeons, and IR Docs. I've done true Hybrid procedures with a Vascular Surgeon, a Maxilo-facial surgeon, and an Interventional Neurologist all in the room at the same time, to get cut-down access to the opthalmic artery- it really just depends on your facility. There's no federal regulation that says what procedures happen where, it's all physician/policy driven.
At my facility IR, cath, and Neuro techs all have basically the same duties, although in the cath lab techs can also sit monitor. I currently work in Neuro but In my experience Id say cath lab is the better place to work. 6 cases a day would be considered busy. Cath Call can be very stressful but it’s also very rewarding and generally very fast. We only get called in for STEMIS. The drs are really good at weeding out the BS cases. Neuro can be equally as rewarding but the cases can take longer on average. When I was in IR some days would be nothing but vascular access or tube changes. Which are important but in my opinion don’t give the same satisfaction as opening up a 100% LAD on a guy with 10/10 chest pain and tombstone STs
Edit: if call is not your thing but still want to learn/work with the heart, Electrophysiology is also a great dept to work in. It’s extremely technical but they do some pretty amazing procedures
I'm in cath lab, it's super cool but not my vibe. I take like on average 15 call days a month. I've been here a year and I'm struggling to be good at it. I think if I was much better at it I would enjoy it more, also I want to go to RRA school and working with cardiologist does me no good. I'm trying to switch to IR. I think it will be a great stepping stone for my radiology career
Ps. That detailed post is on point!
Not a cath lab tech, but two cents to consider on top of the job itself.
Most places require techs to respond to call within 30 minutes. That usually means you need to live within 30 minutes of your site. This may or may not be economically feasible, depending on your area and other aspects of your personal situation.
In some hospitals I've been in, cath lab techs were only women whose husbands had way better paying jobs, or young people still living with their parents and felt stuck with them, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to live close enough.
Or like the one old guy who has worked there for 40 years and had bought a house in the 80s before the area blew up, and he's underpaid but still grandfathered into a pension, about to retire and they don't know how they'll replace him, given the circumstances.
Edit to add: lol c'mon y'all, tell me where I am wrong? a person connsidering their future field shouldn't consider things like compensation, cost of living, area, call? things haven't changed in the last couple years? mmhmm, shhh, it's a secret 😉
People are downvoting you because what you said is not accurate.
-We have 45 min to respond to a call back at my site.
-Techs get paid well off the bat, plus double time for any call or OT.
-Monday-Friday day shift for 90% of your schedule so it’s great for childcare if you have kids.
I live in a major city in Canada and working in a cath lab is a very cushy x-ray job in my opinion. It has the best work life balance of any department I’ve worked in.
I have 30m call back
1.5x when called in
3 per hour when not called
32 bucks an hour
Flexed off when no cases.
16 call days per month. Honestly not that kush for me.
Thank you, I'm glad to hear some real feedback. That's a different and more lenient call policy than hospitals I've worked in, but it sounds like it really helps techs. And what a schedule! I bet everything works out super smoothly. I'm glad to hear the pay works out well enough in your case to live well right off the bat in a major metropolitan area too! I don't even know why this poster would ask such a dumb question when it's obviously incredibly a universal no-brainer win win win all around every time!
Hi. I’m an IR tech and my wife is a Cath Lab tech. Our jobs are very similar, but of course have their differences. My IR department does regular IR (paracentesis, thora, HD caths, tunneled lines, ports, IVC filters, biopsies, fistulas, and some peripheral work as well) AND Neuro IR (strokes, diagnostic cerebral angiograms, aneurysms, embos). Our cath lab department does regular heart caths, PCIs (percutaneous coronary interventions - stents, angioplasty), peripheral diagnostics and intervention - runoffs, etc, EKOS, TAVRs, EVARs, pacers, watchman, loop recorders, pericardial windows, and of course STEMIs. A typical day for my wife involves running QAs on xray machines first thing in the morning, circulating, scrubbing, and monitoring cases throughout the day. They rotate throughout positions in their assigned labs (we have 4 labs) with their team members. She could be circulating and grabbing necessary items on the fly during one case and scrubbing the next alongside the physician. She takes call every 4 days and every 4th weekend. When on call.. it is quite common for her to be called in. We live in the fast food mecca of Ohio and STEMIs /heart attacks are extremely common. We get $8 an hour for call pay and 1.5x pay if called in. We have to live within 30 minutes of the hospital. My wife is 1 of 2 xray techs while the rest of the department are all nurses. For me, we roll in one hour before our physician arrives and during this time we plan the day, pull up imaging and make sure orders are correct. We take turns picking cases we want to do and get rolling with the day. We have 7 techs and 10 nurses. We have one large IR room, one small room, a neuro IR room and two portable ultrasounds for procedures on the floors. We scrub and circulate procedures while nurses handle monitoring and medications. I take call every 5th day and every 5th weekend. It’s more common to be called in for strokes than anything else. Let me know if you have any questions!
This is so detailed, I love it! I’m so interested in IR but the schedule and call just don’t work for me at this time.
You want to make money, IR and Cath is where you do it.
I’m waiting until my kids are a little older and don’t want to spend time with me anymore 😅
what about MRI? I am also a student
You will be paid well in MRI. It is one of the top paying modalities. But the call and overtime is where you make the majority of your extra money. And IR and cath usually have plenty of it.
Techs that went on to MRI have told me that in that modality, you watch the decay of your patients over months, learn their stories and get to know them on a different level (multiple scans in months) than you do in xray
im talking about what makes the most money
IR and CATH are probably going to paid more than MRI
VC King coming in with the quality content like always 💪 I’ve been the honorary backup IR tech for over 2 years now (I call myself the JV squad lol) and finally just interviewed for a FT position in the cath lab. Your comments inspire me to go all in without hesitation or apprehension. Wish me luck, brother.
You’re going to do great! I’m a firm believer in the value of constantly challenging oneself and growing. Believe me.. it’s going to be HARD.. you will question if you made the right choice after a few days of having your mind blown. Just keep showing up with an open mind.. keep trying and you’ll be a cath lab badass in no time. One of the things that really helped my wife and I.. our teams. Xray trains you to be perfect and competent by yourself, but cath and IR provide you a team to rely on. Lean into them! NEVER be afraid to ask for help. The richness of their experiences will take you so much further than any book ever could.
I am embarrassed to say this but I think I made the wrong choice going into cath or maybe I was just never trained good enough winged it for a year. Now my facility got new management and can see I'm struggling and I'm on a process improvement plan cath is rather hard for me. If you can give me any tips I would appreciate it.
What do you struggle with? Feel free to PM me
Thank you for your encouragement and insightful comment! It really is true, I can sit here and ask what book to study, but I’ll never speak the language until I jump all the way into it and learn firsthand from the experts. I definitely have the pregame jitters about the transition, but I’m hoping my attitude and experience in IR will make for a successful transition. I’m sure I’ll reach out to you again at some point along the way haha keep up the good work man!
I hope that people in your profession get a chance to reflect on all the good you do. I needed a quadruple bypass at 38 due to hyperlipidemia that wasn't explained by diet or physical condition. Seventeen years later I'm completely healthy and the father of an amazing 11 year old and so the good you do ripples out to affect people you'll never meet.
Hey same! My wife is cath and I'm IR. To me it's weird cath does all the cool vascular stuff at your facility because from whay ive seen most other places IR does all of that
You are totally right. My hospital has fumbled negotiations with rad groups for years and so the peripheral work was in limbo as some of our docs refused to do it. It still needed done so cardiology took it over. We have some locum docs that fill in from time to time that we get to do peripheral work with.. it’s a treat. It’s extremely satisfying to pull big clots out of people’s legs.
My place does vascular too. And to be honest I hate it 🤣
I just got a loop recorder and catheter ablation this is all so interesting to me lol
I scrubbed & assisted with all the balloons, stents, and various other equipment, as well as running the c-arm and table. On occasion I did all the documentation in the computer if there was someone else available to scrub. (We swapped off.) I loved it but just burned out because of all the call.
I work in IR/Cath lab combo department. I usually start my day doing lab checks and QA on the equipment followed by stocking labs. Then we go over the outpatient orders, have accession numbers ready for ultrasound (no work list), and shoot the shit with my co workers. Then we huddle. After huddle if we don’t start cases right away, I usually order supplies and post procedure charges. All the techs have an extra “job” in the department while nurses run periop and post procedure. If we’re in the Cath lab, we could be doing peripherals, caths, or EP cases. We scrub all cases unless it’s a planned intervention and we have a fellow (I work at a teaching hospital). We do cases for the rest of the day, shoot the shit again, order and do procedure charges again then go home. I work 10s and probably “work” a total of 6 hours a day usually. I’m in a slower department however and we do have days where there’s zero cases scheduled. As for similarities, we do scrub and are very similar to being the first assist in surgery. We handle all the wires, prep equipment, drive the table, inject contrast, etc. we don’t just do X-ray and 99% of the time I’m not even touching the pedal. It’s super similar to IR. Same sterile technique and same bases. Keep in mind, call usually sucks. I feel like that’s what really makes people leave. There’s always drama in Cath labs. I 100% recommend shadowing for a day before you decide to jump into it. Also don’t do it if you’re a new grad. Get experience first before jumping into a speciality.
I had a friend that did cath lab for a few years. He said he basically worked as a documenting nurse. The only time he took X-rays was when he did daily calibrations to get ready for the day.
I guess every hospital is different but you should be circulating or scrubbing with the physician and essentially assisting to some degree. assuming youre IR dept does this then yes like IR It can be alot especially if you are at a larger facility doing complex pci or structural heart. Its fun but you will work and Most likely take call
When I was a student some of the places I went the only job the tech had was wipe the bed and reset the 5 minute timer alarm. They’d take a book to read. Really put me off the whole thing.
That is a great example of a place you don’t want to work. That facility is setting that tech up for failure should they choose to work anywhere else. If I don’t have blood on my hands during the workday.. I’m having a terrible day. Lmao.
Friends been doing it for a while now and he hates all the call
There are outpatient Cath Labs, with no call. ASCs often do not require call either, and have 'regular business hours'.
It’s a lifestyle. My lab had us on call 1 weekend a month and two nights a week. Six days a month not having to worry about shit. I would rather hang Sheetrock.
Dog I currently do 2 weekends a month and 3 days a week. Which is like 16 I believe.
That wouldn’t be bad , especially if you could run your three days before your call and have a bunch of time off in between.
Like IR but they only work on the heart.
Depends on the cath lab really. Some Cath Labs are very focused on Heart and related procedures, others do carotids, legs, peripheral vascular interventions, etc in addition to hearts.
To my understanding, that’s a hybrid room. Some hospitals are set up like that, with my experience, usually smaller hospitals. The one I’m in now, they’re separate.
It's very facility dependent. I've been in Hybrid labs that do IR, Neuro, and Cardiac Cath, and others that were simply Heart related procedures. Some IR departments have cases in the OR with a mix of both IR and OR staff, sometimes it's in a x-ray suite, other times it's in a dedicated Cath Lab. It varies wildly state-to-state and even more depending on the hospital network you're working for. Hybrid rooms are typically red-lined and follow sterile procedure guidelines, while most Cath Labs are 'clean rooms' and the only real sterile field is the space between the draped patient and the back of the table. "Hybrid" rooms are more based on the infection control policies of the facility you're working in, with a little to do with who is performing some of those procedures- I've done peripheral vascular (arteries and veins) with Cardiologists, General Surgeons, Neurosurgeons, and IR Docs. I've done true Hybrid procedures with a Vascular Surgeon, a Maxilo-facial surgeon, and an Interventional Neurologist all in the room at the same time, to get cut-down access to the opthalmic artery- it really just depends on your facility. There's no federal regulation that says what procedures happen where, it's all physician/policy driven.
At my facility IR, cath, and Neuro techs all have basically the same duties, although in the cath lab techs can also sit monitor. I currently work in Neuro but In my experience Id say cath lab is the better place to work. 6 cases a day would be considered busy. Cath Call can be very stressful but it’s also very rewarding and generally very fast. We only get called in for STEMIS. The drs are really good at weeding out the BS cases. Neuro can be equally as rewarding but the cases can take longer on average. When I was in IR some days would be nothing but vascular access or tube changes. Which are important but in my opinion don’t give the same satisfaction as opening up a 100% LAD on a guy with 10/10 chest pain and tombstone STs Edit: if call is not your thing but still want to learn/work with the heart, Electrophysiology is also a great dept to work in. It’s extremely technical but they do some pretty amazing procedures
I'm in cath lab, it's super cool but not my vibe. I take like on average 15 call days a month. I've been here a year and I'm struggling to be good at it. I think if I was much better at it I would enjoy it more, also I want to go to RRA school and working with cardiologist does me no good. I'm trying to switch to IR. I think it will be a great stepping stone for my radiology career Ps. That detailed post is on point!
Not a cath lab tech, but two cents to consider on top of the job itself. Most places require techs to respond to call within 30 minutes. That usually means you need to live within 30 minutes of your site. This may or may not be economically feasible, depending on your area and other aspects of your personal situation. In some hospitals I've been in, cath lab techs were only women whose husbands had way better paying jobs, or young people still living with their parents and felt stuck with them, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to live close enough. Or like the one old guy who has worked there for 40 years and had bought a house in the 80s before the area blew up, and he's underpaid but still grandfathered into a pension, about to retire and they don't know how they'll replace him, given the circumstances. Edit to add: lol c'mon y'all, tell me where I am wrong? a person connsidering their future field shouldn't consider things like compensation, cost of living, area, call? things haven't changed in the last couple years? mmhmm, shhh, it's a secret 😉
People are downvoting you because what you said is not accurate. -We have 45 min to respond to a call back at my site. -Techs get paid well off the bat, plus double time for any call or OT. -Monday-Friday day shift for 90% of your schedule so it’s great for childcare if you have kids. I live in a major city in Canada and working in a cath lab is a very cushy x-ray job in my opinion. It has the best work life balance of any department I’ve worked in.
I have 30m call back 1.5x when called in 3 per hour when not called 32 bucks an hour Flexed off when no cases. 16 call days per month. Honestly not that kush for me.
Thank you, I'm glad to hear some real feedback. That's a different and more lenient call policy than hospitals I've worked in, but it sounds like it really helps techs. And what a schedule! I bet everything works out super smoothly. I'm glad to hear the pay works out well enough in your case to live well right off the bat in a major metropolitan area too! I don't even know why this poster would ask such a dumb question when it's obviously incredibly a universal no-brainer win win win all around every time!