Physician, LA County and USC Hospital Dept. of Radiology

>> Hi. I'm Ashley Prosper and I'm a resident physician at USC training in diagnostic radiology. So, I work at LA County Hospital as well as USC's private hospital Keck and I do diagnostic radiology. Basically, we are the people in the hospital that do all the medical imaging so that includes your CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, and a bunch of other modalities of imaging. We're largely consultants for all the physicians in the hospital so we help them figure out what's going on with the patient. And we sometimes offer interventions to some image-guided procedures. It's a really wide variety. We image all ages of patients so we do pediatrics all the way up into geriatrics. And then we do outpatients who are people who are generally pretty stable all the way into acute traumas that are coming through our ER. So, on any given day, [laughter] you could see a healthy child exam all the way up to a huge multi-vehicle accident collision, gunshot wounds. It's a really big variety. So, a large component of it is sitting in the reading room and going over the images that are acquired that day. But then whenever we actually do some sort of image-guided therapies, say a biopsy or putting in a drain to, let's say, relieve an abscess or something like that, it does involve a lot of face-to-face time with the patient. So, for me, that's a great mix because I feel like the number of patient interactions that I have I'm able to provide, like, a high-quality interaction because they're a little bit more limited. And that works really well for me. It varies from day-to-day whether or not we're on-call. During your intern year when you're first training, you do have a lot of 16-hour days. They've actually eliminated the 30-hour continuous shifts for interns. Once you become a postgraduate year 2, you can work up to 30 hours at a time, but this is often broken up with a nap [laughter] which is nice.