Working Conditions and Physical Demands

In hospital, It’s shift work! It’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. They don’t close. Clinic is a Monday to Friday job because, it’s the pushy one. Some people like the clinic because of the pace and because of the hours. Someone like myself, I like the hospital because of the pace. Not really, because of the hours, when I used to work nights, it wasn’t always the greatest thing but I like it because of the pace.  Anything that is closed toe. You don’t want to be wearing any open toe shoes at the hospital because someone will drive over your foot with a wheelchair, drive over your foot with a stretcher, a patient could fall on you, whatever.


Be physically fit and use good body mechanics. The number one thing is that body mechanics are key in this job. That we’re using our legs and backs properly so that we’re not hurting ourselves. There’s a lot of patient transferring, we have to move patients from the stretcher to our X-ray table, we have to assist patients from sitting into a standing position out of a wheelchair, we have to assist them from the wheelchair to sit on the table and lie down. There is a lot of physical involvement with the job. As well, when we go to move the equipment, a lot of the equipment that we move is above our head so we have to be able to work in that extension of our arms as well.