Patient-care technicians don't administer medicine like nurses or make diagnoses like doctors, but they are responsible for helping out with almost anything else a patient might need.
That can include helping new patients into hospital gowns, taking preliminary measures of vital signs and performing blood work. It's not unusual for technicians to care for eight or more patients at any given time.
And time is rarely on their side.
"You're dealing with life-and-death situations," says Cailey Dahl, a patient-care technician in the emergency department at Morristown Memorial Hospital in New Jersey.
"Sometimes people come in and they're coding [going into cardiac arrest], or they're about to code. You're running to the blood bank, literally sprinting to get there. You don't get decision-making hours or even minutes. It's seconds."
Experienced patient-care technicians earn a median income of just $36,500. That's not much, considering the life-saving work that they do.
