Overcoming Challenges as a Sonographer

Emmanuel Soto: Challenges – they are commonplace everywhere, especially in healthcare, and sonographers are no strangers to the different challenges that can come along with patient care.

Today, we'll be talking about how sonographers can face challenges, or as our guest Tristan likes to call them, “technically difficult situations,” with success.

Recently, Tristan wrote an article titled Beyond Technically Difficult Studies where he discussed how sonographers can tackle various issues they could encounter in their work.

In your article you mentioned an area of difficulty that I'm sure every sonographer can relate to and every professional really, but especially if you work in healthcare, and that’s time management.

So, could you tell us how you overcame that hurdle of time management, and what key piece of advice you would give to newer sonographers?

Triston Thompson: You know, [as] sonographers, our jobs are very complex. There's so many parts to it.

There is the technical aspect of you knowing what to do, when to do it. There's a clinical aspect of you understanding what you're looking at.

And then there is the patient care aspect of you actually meeting someone for the first time and being that healthcare provider for them in that moment.

Now, as a new sonographer fresh out of school, these challenges are even more amplified because there's a high level of uncertainty of your own skill set, as you mentioned, of what you're doing. And it feels sometimes as if you're not sure how to navigate [that].

I remember my first echo interview. It was actually in Jamaica, where I grew up. So after I got done with school here, I went back there and I interviewed and it took me 90 minutes to do the echocardiogram [during the interview].

And I remember feeling just so defeated.?

Fast forward a couple months later, I was promoted to lead for that organization because I had figured out how to manage my time.

Emmanuel Soto: I also really loved how in your article you talked [about], or [rather] you dedicated a whole section really to navigating the workplace.

And you described the perfect world where basically everyone gets along and all the stakeholders are happy. But the truth is that even in the best healthcare facility with the best team, there's bound to be disagreements and the occasional contention between clinicians or between clinicians and admins.

What key piece of advice would you give to sonographers in leadership when it comes to handling disagreements in the workplace?

Triston Thompson: This is a question I get asked very frequently.

At [my current] facility, I feel like I I grew up here, I was a student and [then] I was a technologist 1, technologist 2, then lead and then now the imaging manager for non-invasive cardiology.

So I really grew up here, and what I learned transitioning from lead to manager, from a sonographer to a manager, [is] that your set of skills that would make you a great sonographer – your ability to produce great images, to assess the case really well, to provide good preliminary interpretation – do not translate over to management or leadership.

It's a whole different set of skills that you're now being measured by and one main point is conflict resolution.

We hope you enjoyed this excerpt of our interview with Triston Thompson BS, ACS, RCS, RDCS, RVT, FASE. Click here to watch the full video interview.