catmania

Expensive but oh-so-worth it are Z-Coils. Pay the extra to get the enclosed heel so you don't have to worry about the coils getting caught in tubing/lines/etc. There are 2 stores in the Valley - one in Gilbert at Gilbert/Guadalupe and I believe the other is in Old Town Scottsdale.

I'll be graduating from a radiography program in May and we have the same concerns as you nursing people. A glut of x-ray techs being churned out by various programs plus cutbacks/freezes at hospitals is making the employment picture rather bleak for us at the moment. Older techs have been telling us that this is cyclical, there are always good times and bad times and sometimes the bad times are *really* bad. But we've been told that there is *always* something. You may have to be willing to travel farther, take a couple part time or pool positions, or otherwise rearrange your ideas of what you thought you were going to do. I would think it must be the same for nursing. Good luck to all of you!

I completed GWCC's HUC program last year. Graduated in May, got a job at SHC in June and was unexpectedly called up for my program a year early (radiography), so only actually worked as a HUC for 2 months. Starting pay for me was a little over $12 - I had 3 years' experience as an MA which they counted. Base pay was $11 something. Good luck!

I went through my local community college's HUC course which was 1 semester long, became certified and worked for a couple months as a HUC before starting my radiography program. If you like clerical work, don't want to be in nursing yet want to be in a hospital setting, then I think this is a good position to get into. The hospital I worked at still had physical charts so it was my responsibility to keep up with the charts (36 of them!) - as doctors or nurses would write orders and flag them, I had to then go through and place the orders in the computer system. Sometimes I either had to call other doctors for consults or I had to call other facilities for services. If patients had to go to a skilled nursing facility, I had to copy the chart. If the chart became too bulky, it had to be thinned. At the hospital where I did my clinicals, the HUC had to answer the patient call lights and determine who needed to be informed: the tech/PCT/CNA or nurse, but at the place I actually worked all I was responsible for answering was the 12 incoming lines. Some facilities require that their HUCs also be CNAs. This is is just a little bit of what a HUC ends up doing during their day. It does get incredibly stressful at times but it was a great job and if I didn't have plans to move on educationally/careerwise, I would have probably stayed in it. As for how HCUs are treated, I really think that how you're treated, whether as a HUC or something else, has a lot to do with how you treat others. You can get certified by the national organization and renewal is every 3 years. Some places prefer it, others don't seem to care. The pay was pretty decent but keep in mind that what's decent here may be peanuts elsewhere. At the hospital I was at, starting pay was just over $11/hr. I came in with 3 years' experience in the medical field already, so made $12.40 base pay. Then there are differentials paid for weekend shift, evenings and nights. Pool/PRN HUCs made more but also weren't paid benefits. Like I said, I went to school to learn this but there are places that will train you. Hope this answered your question! If you have any others to ask, feel free to PM me.

Hey MassagetoRN - I'm not sure what to say regarding clinical sites. Mine is Banner Gateway in Gilbert - my school has clinical sites all over the valley and everyone in my program was eligible to be in Project Ayuda. The Project Ayuda program coordinator, Katherine Forbes, could probably answer your questions better than me. Her contact info is: Katherine Forbes Project Ayuda Coordinator Paradise Valley Community College Office: 602-787-6657 Fax: 602-787-7297 [email protected] My entire 2 year rad tech program will consist of just over 1800 clinical hours. All of my hours will count toward two service terms of 900 hours each, so I won't have to worry about supplementing somehow. There are service terms smaller than 900 hours available.

You can read about Project Ayuda here: http://www.pvc.maricopa.edu/~ayuda/ One "catch" is that they only have a certain amount of slots open each year for people to be in this program, so if it's full you might have to wait for the next year. When we had our clinical orientation last semester, the project coordinator for our school came in and gave a short presentation. This is how I got started. And yes, the clinical hours that you have to put in as part of your program do count as volunteer service. There's a little bit of paperwork in the beginning, every month you have to turn in a time sheet and before your service term is finished, you have to complete a few online modules at the PVCC site.

I'm also a math dunce but I had a wonderful teacher at Gateway CC and came out of her class with an A. I asked her about online classes and she said that with all the resources available (tutoring through the college, ability to email the teacher questions, etc) anyone should be able to make it through an online course. Good Luck!

I'm in a rad tech program and I decided to do this very thing - live on student loans so I can concentrate fully on school. I received one loan through Bank of America (think they call it their Education Maximizer) and several different ones through Sallie Mae. I would just caution you to really pay attention to how much money you're taking out and what your payments will be like vs. how much money you will realistically be bringing in. Scholarship programs I have no idea about but I would highly suggest that you look into Project Ayuda. This is an Americorps program which is run out of Paradise Valley Community College (but available to people in other colleges and even other programs). With Project Ayuda, your clinical time counts as volunteer work and once you total up a certain amount of hours, you are given an educational award. In my case, I signed up for a 900 hour block of time and at the end of that I'll be getting just over $2K to be used towards student loans/tuition. Hope that helps!

Last I heard, on-call HUCs at Scottsdale Healthcare make $13/hr and the on-call HUCs at Banner make $14/hr. I was a regular HUC at SHC and with 3 years previous non-HUC experience I was making $12.40/hr. Good luck!

If you do go for phlebotomy, I would suggest going through Phoenix College instead of Pima, just because of the cost involved. Most of the postings I've seen for phlebotomists want you to be already trained - I haven't heard of any hospitals who will train you. (Not that that means there aren't any out there.) When I was looking into it a couple of years ago, it seemed that around 9.50 or so was the starting pay. Banner has oodles of phlebotomy listings and they have pretty good benefits. Health Unit Coordinator is another good one that gets you in the hospital. Gateway Community College is the only one with an actual HUC course, but you don't necessarily have to have formal education to get into that kind of position. Hope that helps and good luck!

I'm not a nurse but I do work on a med/surg unit and the nurses have both 12 hour shifts (7-7:30) and 8 hour shifts (7-3,3-11 - there might be 11-7 nurses but I'm out of there by then, so I'm not sure!).

I tried to take ENG 102 online a couple years ago and ended up having to drop it because I overcommitted myself with work/school/other stuff. I don't know if the course has changed or not but part of the regular length class involved reading a novel and writing a literary analysis on it (as well as all the other papers you have to do - 102 is the Research Paper English class!). If you took the accelerated class, you at least got out of having to read the novel. I ended up taking 102 through Rio but I took it as a 6 week accelerated course and actually went to the Rio building in Tempe one night a week for the class. It involved a literary analysis of a short story, and the research paper (proposal, interview, annotated bibliography, draft, final paper). If you have time to take it that way, it's not *easy* when you have a lot of other stuff on your plate but at least it's over *quickly*. Hope that helped!

I get mine done through http://www.cprinstruction.com - you get a 2 year certification card through the American Heart Association. I've used them for both my first aid and CPR and I really like the instructors.