BACKROUND: The radiographer’s professional work has not been studied much and the work tasks in computed tomography examinations have not been studied at all earlier in Finland. Radiographer’s professionalism in radiological diagnostic examinations consist of the treatment of the patient, the management of the scanning technique and the knowledge of the high-quality imaging; therefore so versatile competence is needed in computed tomography examinations. Additionally the radiation doses in computed tomography are high and accumulated radiation dose to people significant, 50-80 % from all medical use of radiation. In this thesis we wanted to study radiographer’s professionalism in computed tomography imaging in Finland.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to describe what kind of work tasks the radiographer’s profession consist of in computed tomography examinations, what kind of distinction there is between work tasks and what kind of changes are expected in the long term in Finland. This study can be used in the development of the radiographer’s education, in standardizing work tasks and in the development of the radiographer’s work.

METHOD: In this study quantitative method was used. Data was collected with an electronic questionnaire which was sent to computed tomography appliance’s main user in every hospital. The data collected from large area: from 43 computed tomography unit from all over Finland. The data was analysed with SPSS 19.0 and Webropol 2.0-programmes.

RESULTS: The actions that are related to carrying out patient’s examination and caring of the patient like checking the referral and anamnesis were mainly performed always or nearly always. The actions related in the specialist’s work like producing the reformates and performing quality assurance measurements were done less, still fairly often. The re-evaluating of the justification of the examination and describing the radiation dose and the risks of the radiation doses to patients were done significantly less. The respondents supposed that the radiographer’s work is going to be more demanding in the near future. As the number of patients is rising, the responsibility of the radiographers is increasing too. The technique evolves and demands even more knowledge and skills.

CONCLUSIONS: In this study we found out that the radiographer’s work experience, the daily amount of examinations performed were connected to the answers, as well as the type of hospital. In the future it could be interesting to study this subject with larger sampling or with qualitative method.