B.E.'s Got it right.
I switched from reactors to hospital a little over 4 years ago. Doing a little bit of everything, surveys, decon, calibrations, training etc.
We have about the largest program in the country, but still we have only 5 techs. The pay is "OK" and it's steady, I have a retirement package after I get vested next year and my 403b is building. (After 14+ years on the road, 20 plants and I don't remember how many outages, just staying home is pretty darn nice). Its all predominantly low level contamination control. Almost zero job coverage unless one the of sinks in laboratories gets clogged and we clear it for the plummers. We have one tech for the clinical side, and 4 for the research laboratories. The clinical tech deals with patient information and instruction predominantly for thryoid ablation therapy, but we have other clinical things involving radioisotope therapy that he may have a hand in. Other techincal duties: Leak testing, dose calibrator verification, surveys etc. Patient room decon. (we all share that)
The clinical aspects, administration of isotopes or issuance of prescriptions doses are done by nuclear medicine techs, which I believe is at least an AS degree with cert for the former and BS degree in nuclear pharmacy for the latter. The prescriptions are of course written by physicians specializing is the appropriate areas. Those folks work in the nuclear medicine department. The techs there do their own decon, and area surveys. The surveys our tech does are for compliance.
Our Radiation Safety program is large enough to warrant a dedicated RSO (MS in Medical physics worked his way through grad school as an x-ray tech), who also happens to be a Certified Medical Physicist(currently non practicing). A smaller place would usually have a radiologist (MD) acting as the RSO.
The medical physics usually requires at least a Masters degree. From discussion with my boss, the asst RSO (MS in HP, undergrad Physics) the university based programs that created most of the Health Physicists in the country are slanting more and more to medical physics. Not a bad life, and the pay on that end is pretty good.
I'm not at a university hospital, but we are a teaching hospital and research institution, so you come in contact with the best and the brightest folks from all around the world. I think that's pretty cool. The road was fun, but I think I finally finished the withdrawal symptoms of being an "outage junkie".
best to all,
Melissa