Ultrasound team leader Julie Bronson demonstrates how she uses ultrasound at Inland Imaging. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
Diagnostic Medical Sonography
Physical therapy assistant Trisha Denman works with 12-year-old patient Kaleb at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO director at North Idaho College. “Are you just going through a rough patch, or is it time to jump out of a nest that you’ve built up around yourself?” A college’s admissions office can be a good place to start, Hudson says. Reach out to them and they can help you navigate through the process. The good news for those looking for a career change is that there is no shortage of educational opportunities in the Inland Northwest for those ready to join the ranks of people seeking a new beginning. Many of the programs prepare students for challenging, but rewarding, careers with a growing demand for workers nationwide and comfortable salaries. Our area’s community colleges offer a variety of educational programs that can be an efficient and cost-effective way to train you for a job that works for you. Here’s a guide to a small sampling of those programs:
PROGRAM OFFERED AT: Spokane Community College PROGRAM LENGTH: Two years DEGREE: Associate in Applied Science ESTIMATED MEDIAN SALARY: $66,410 per year nationwide JOB OUTLOOK: 39 percent growth (much faster than average) nationally from 2010 to 2022 Interested in human anatomy? Like to help others? Want to work in a patient care setting as an integral part of a medical team? Diagnostic medical sonography might be for you. It’s an allied health profession in which practitioners perform diagnostic and monitoring procedures using high-frequency sound waves to make dynamic images of organs, tissues or blood flow inside the body. Those images are then used by physicians to diagnose and treat medical conditions. Sonography also can be used to guide needles for tissue biopsy, or to drain an abnormal fluid collection from a body cavity. Sonographers work in a variety of settings, including hospitals, physician offices and medical and diagnostic laboratories. Diagnostic medical sonography is a rapidly advancing specialty, thanks to ongoing technological advances. Among other requirements, students must provide three letters of recommendation, undergo immunizations and drug screening, and complete 40 hours as a volunteer or employee in a patient-care setting and 10 of those hours need to be in a sonography department. Students entering this and other allied health care programs should be prepared to work very hard in school, says Dr. JL Henriksen, dean of Health and Environmental Sciences for the Community Colleges of Spokane. “They are intensive programs,” he says. “There’s a lot of material, but very rewarding occupations once they make it through the programs.”
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