Tag: Radiology staffing

Healthcare facilities, whether hospitals, standalone imaging centers, or outpatient care units, are grappling with the global radiologist shortage. Factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, burnout-related retirements or career changes, and the increased demand for imaging among an aging population have converged, straining healthcare professionals who were already in high demand.

A recent survey conducted by Radiology Business reveals ongoing challenges within the imaging field, affecting various roles including radiologists, administrators, and technologists. The survey data highlights several key findings:

Challenges: The top three challenges for professionals in the imaging specialty are “increased workload due to organizational changes,” “overall staffing levels,” and “increased patient volumes.” These challenges have persisted over the years.

Recruitment Competition: The competition for hiring radiologists has intensified, leading hospitals and practices to offer incentives such as six-figure sign-on bonuses, flexible hours, extended vacation time, and immediate partnership tracks.

Radiologist Compensation: Radiologist compensation continues to rise, with an average gross annual salary of $481,660 in 2022. This represents a 13% increase from the previous year. Total compensation, including bonuses, averaged $589,505.

Fair Compensation Perception: The majority of respondents across various roles felt fairly compensated, with percentages ranging from 56.8% (radiologic technologists) to 66.7% (across all titles).

Job Stability and Satisfaction: Despite the high demand for professionals, a significant portion (58.8%) decided to stay in their current positions, citing factors like slow licensure processes, long onboarding times, economic uncertainty, and housing challenges.

Financial Pressures: Financial challenges within organizations are a concern across all titles, with “external financial pressure on our organization” ranking as the top concern affecting job security and satisfaction.

Burnout and Workload: Burnout is a significant issue due to high patient volumes, increased workloads, and staffing shortages. Overworked or burned-out feelings were reported by various professionals.

How is the Healthcare Industry Responding to this Radiology Shortage?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative solution in radiology. It expedites diagnoses, improves efficiency, and acts as valuable decision support. This is particularly crucial in remote areas with limited access to radiologists. AI’s potential is highlighted through its applications in various medical scenarios, such as breast cancer detection, tuberculosis detection, lung cancer detection, and fracture detection and prediction. AI offers advantages like enhanced diagnostic accuracy, increased efficiency, early disease detection, decision support, continuous learning, standardization, accessibility, cost savings, and facilitating research. However, challenges include data quality and quantity, integration with existing systems, regulatory and ethical considerations, validation and interpretability, bias and fairness, human-AI collaboration, technical limitations, adoption and training, cost and infrastructure, and malfunction and safety. Despite these challenges, AI holds the potential to revolutionize radiology, address the radiologist shortage, and transform healthcare globally.

Partnering with Momentum for Radiologist Staffing

Partnering with an experienced healthcare recruiting firm like us offers your healthcare facility a strategic advantage in sourcing a pool of qualified radiologists. Our deep industry expertise and extensive network enable us to identify top-tier professionals efficiently, streamlining your hiring process. Our insights into market trends and recruitment challenges empower us to tailor solutions that resonate with candidates and meet your staffing needs. With our guidance, you can overcome the intensifying competition for radiologists and secure the best talent to enhance your team’s expertise and patient care. Contact Momentum Healthcare Staffing to learn more about radiology recruitment.

Sources:

Radiologybusiness.com
Itnonline.com
techopedia.com

What Is Colorectal Cancer?

Colorectal cancer is a form of cancer that grows in the colon or rectum, which are parts of the large intestine. Typically it develops as a polyp or growth along the inner lining of the rectum or colon, becoming cancerous over time. 

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosis in men and women globally. Approximately 1 in 23 men and 1 in 26 women will develop colorectal cancer during their lifetime depending on their overall risk factors. Preventive measures like regular screenings can help detect colorectal cancer early when it is easier to treat.

Symptoms of colorectal cancer may include rectal bleeding, changes in bowel habits, fatigue, abdominal pain, and unexpected weight loss. However, early stages of the disease may not show any symptoms.

Encourage Your Patients to Get Screened

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends adults ages 50 to 75 should be screened for colorectal cancer. Here are some tips for healthcare providers to encourage and educate their patients to get screened for colorectal cancer:

1. Talk to your patient: Start the conversation by going over the importance of regular screening. Discuss the symptoms, risk factors, benefits of early preventative detection, treatment, and other options. Encourage them to talk openly about their health and concerns.
2. Go over their screening options: Patients may not realize there are other screening options besides a colonoscopy. Advancements in medical technology include visual or structural exams, non-invasive at-home tests, and multi-target stool DNA tests. Of course, there are also imaging tests using x-rays, and CT scans. Together, you can determine the right screening option for your patients. Use simple language that your patients can understand instead of medical jargon and terms that may sound intimidating.
3. Go over the importance of prevention and follow-ups: The best way to mitigate health issues doesn’t end with treatment. It’s equally important that patients understand the importance of follow-ups. Any abnormalities can be quickly detected and treated.
4. Offer educational resources: Patients can process and understand colorectal cancer with brochures and other reading material.

Like any medical procedure, the best way to encourage your patients to screen regularly is through consistent communication and education. Patients who are active participants in their healthcare plan are more likely to understand the importance of early detection and screening for colorectal cancer, which fits the goal for National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.

Solutions for your Staffing Challenges

If you’re seeking staffing for any of your medical center positions, whether that is for a physician, nurse practitioner or even radiologist, Momentum Healthcare Staffing is here to help! We match the best medical professional candidates to fit your hospital, urgent care center or private practice needs. Call us to learn more: (877) 558-3782.

Shows like Star Trek depict medicine and medical procedures as easy and painless as an afternoon on a lounge chair. A doctor waves an instrument over the patient’s body and voila! All is fixed. Although we’re not quite that advanced (yet), we’re getting closer and closer. Medical advances in the last twenty years have included wearable devices, HPV and COVID vaccines, and bionic limbs, making medical procedures and healthcare in general faster, smoother, and less painful. Now, with the technologies of interventional radiology, patients can be treated for a variety of diseases, including cancer, without surgery, anesthesia, or pain.

Originally founded in the 1960s by Charles Dotter, MD, interventional radiology (IR) treats a variety of conditions, including stroke, transplant support, and cancer. These conditions and diseases are treated through minimally invasive, image-guided treatment that once required surgery, says the Society of Interventional Radiology. This example of modern medicine is performed by board certified interventional radiologists who are trained in radiology and in minimally invasive therapies, says the article.

The term interventional radiology may sound vague to some, however, a more in-depth description of what is actually done is this: to diagnose and treat many diseases, an IR can, in many cases, forego surgery and hospitalization by inserting various instruments into the body, says John Hopkins Medicine. Catheters, wires, x-rays, CT scans, and ultrasound technology help guide the IR to internally see the patient and treat the issue. The cuts involved in inserting the tools can be as small as a pinhole, says WebMD.

Interventional radiology is monumental in cancer treatment, says WebMD. By placing chemotherapy and radioactive medicines into the affected areas, it directly treats the disease, prevents bleeding (during surgery). It also aids in pain from cancer treatment side effects such as blood clots and fluid buildup, says the article. More amazing procedures IRs can perform for cancer are killing cancer tumors via heat through radio waves or electric currents, or freezing them with ice crystals. IR also treats conditions with blood vessels, kidneys, and gallstones.

Training to become an IR is extensive. IRs are medical doctors that are trained in radiology, minimally invasive procedures, radiation safety and physics, and must have a comprehensive knowledge of the latest procedures available as well as diagnostic and clinical experience, says Radiologyinfo. IRs can be hospital based, meaning they travel to and from a couple of different hospitals within their work week, and/or they can be a part of specialty group practices, outside of the hospital, says the American Medical Association. An IR usually spends four days a week treating patients, and about one day a week doing administrative work, referring physicians, consults, and completing notes, says the article. They have become an integral part of a treatment team within hospitals and private practices. 

We are living in an exciting time of medicine, where seeing and treating the body is becoming less about invasive exploration and more about advanced imagery. It’s not quite body scanners and needle-free hyposprays, but it’s safe to say we are learning and going places, medically, where no man has gone before.

Looking for the Perfect IR Placement?

Balancing work and life as an interventional radiologist can prove challenging. Finding a position that offers the compensation you deserve and the hours that allow you to have your own free time is important. Luckily, Momentum Healthcare Staffing helps match IRs with the best hospitals. Please contact us to learn more and be sure to bookmark our jobs page for the latest Locums Tenens and permanent placements.

To be a medically practicing physician or nurse in California, students must maintain a medical license with the proper accreditation. Once licensed, physicians can diagnose patients, prescribe medication, and administer treatment.

Physicians and Nurse Practitioners must continue their education to maintain their licenses. After graduating, nurses and physicians must continue their education to obtain their licenses. In the years following, they’ll need to renew their licenses.

Physicians — Board-Approved Postgraduate Training

To earn their license, physicians must participate in 12 months of training from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).

Physicians may also complete their training in Canada. Accreditation may come from The College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) or the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC).

After completion, they will receive a postgraduate training license (PTL). The PTL is valid for 90 days after completing their 12-month training to allow time for licensure.

After the first 12 months of training, trainees must get a California Physician and Surgeon license.

Physicians — Renewing Your License

Licenses don’t last forever, so physicians need to apply to renew them. Licenses expire every two years; those received after July 1, 2018, expire at midnight on the expiration date.

Physicians need to verify that they’ve gotten credit for 36 months of postgraduate training approved by the board. Twenty-four months of that training must be through the same training program.

Physicians — Continuing Education

Working in the medical field entails physicians continuing their education long after graduating.

In California, MDs must have 50 hours of approved continuing medical education (CME) credits every license cycle. All of these credits must be Category 1 approved.

DOs must also have 50 hours of approved CME credits every license cycle. But 20 of those hours must be an AOA category 1A or 1B.

Most physicians must complete a one-time training in treating terminally ill patients and pain management. Radiologists and pathologists are the only ones exempt from this training.

Nurses & Nurse Practitioners — Maintaining An Active License

Registered nurses (RNs) in California must complete 30 hours of continuing education every two years. RNs must take the courses through a provider that the Board of Registered Nursing recognizes.

Continuing education courses must be relevant to nursing and improve student knowledge. Students should have learned more through the course than is required for practice.

RNs must keep records of grade slips or certificates for four years after course completion because they are proof that nurses have completed the required continuing education. All registered nurses may be subject to random audits.

Nurses renewing their license for the first time do not have to complete these requirements if they took the exam less than two years prior. However, nurses within their first two years of licensure must still complete one credit hour in an implicit bias course.

Nurse practitioners are not required to take additional continuing education classes outside the necessary 30 hours.

Conclusion

To practice medicine in California, nurses and physicians must take continuing education courses and maintain their licenses. Licenses expire every two years, and practitioners and nurses must continue taking classes to renew their licenses.

Seeking a Career Boost or Change?

It is not unusual for doctors or nurse practitioners to feel burned out or even not fairly compensated from their jobs. In these unfortunate common cases, it can leave a doctor or NP to feel deflated and with no options. The good news is, when you partner with a healthcare recruiting agency like Momentum, we help find you the best employers and hospitals to work with based on your desired salary and work schedule. Please bookmark our jobs page or call us now to get help finding the permanent or Locum Tenens assignment you deserve!.