Staffing survey says...

A recent survey has confirmed what we here at Enterprise Imaging realized years ago as we searched for fresh developments in the X-ray modality-X-ray usage is being supplanted by more advanced modalities.

This news comes from the staffing firm of Med Travelers, which found that demands ultrasound/vascular and interventional technologists has increased steadily over the past three years. The need for vascular/ultrasound techs leaped from 11 percent of the company's staffing assignments to 24 percent in 2007; interventional assignments jumped from 4 to 16 percent in that same three-year period. Only 9 percent of the company's staffing assignments were of the radiologic garden variety-down an unhealthy 12 percent from three years earlier.

The reason for the growth of the two aforementioned modalities? Increasing incidents of cardiovascular disease and diabetes among our population, says the company.

But perhaps an even more intriguing aspect of the Med Travelers survey lies with the reasons why technologists prefer traveling assignments to permanent work at one facility. Not surprisingly, most of them (85 percent) cite the better pay as a benefit. But what did surprise me was the second most-cited reason: 59 percent love the so-called thrill of travel. By comparison, only 45 percent cited a liberation from office politics.

I must be in the minority here, but the jolt of continual physical displacement would seem an acceptable but hardly thrilling tradeoff to higher-paying temp work-certainly not it's second-most attractive feature. Of course, this comes from a guy who feels so excruciatingly discombobulated after only three days at a Washington, D.C. Economics of Diagnostic Imaging conference that he stumbles into the hotel in the early evening of the second day, dives onto a strange bed that makes his skin crawl at the thought of where the sheets have been, wakes unrefreshed the next morning and inadvertently leaves behind several articles of clothing, never to be worn again. To live a variation of that existence for much of my professional life is unfathomable to me.

But the joy of an endless succession of honeymoon periods with each of your short-term employers, free of office backbiting, transparent attempts at one-upmanship, and the mindnumbing sameness of watching the same borderline-incompetent co-workers coast along while the same few hapless chumps shoulder the burden of that extra workload? To my mind, such a work perk would not only trump the "freedom" of travel, but it would rival any added financial incentive that comes with being a rolling stone in the rocky world of modern health care.