Going on call is not as difficult for a vascular laboratory as you might 
think (as I thought for a long time) especially if you have a more than one 
or two technologists on staff to participate. I have a hospital based lab 
and several instances arouse in which influential attending physicians 
complained that they could not get vascular studies on their patients 
after hours or on weekends. We were always open, at least on a limited 
basis on all holidays except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day. 
Eventually, after years of resistance by the Medical Director and my 
predecessor, I had to develop a plan for an on call schedule.
I have, at this time, three full time technologists in the laboratory and 
I developed a schedule where they would each be on call for one week at a 
time, from Monday evening when the lab closes, until the following Monday 
morning when it opens at 8:00 am, including all 24 hours of Saturday and 
Sunday. Closing time varies from 6:00pm, usually, to 8:00pm on occasion 
as scheduled. They receive a small though reasonable hourly sum for being 
on call. If they are called in they receive a minimum of 3 hours pay (even 
if the request is cancelled by the time they arrive. Since they are all 
full time 40 hour/week employees, that means that the 3 hours are paid at 
the time-and-a-half overtime rate, and at the appropriate differential 
for evening, night , weekend day or night, etc. We also stipulated a 
policy that all requests must be made by an attending and approved as 
medically necessary and of an emergent nature by the vascular surgeon on 
call before the operator pages the technologist (although, as you may 
imagine, this part sometimes gets skipped).
We really don't get a great number of calls and the medical center 
(especially the emergency room) is very pleased with the availability of 
this service.
Although there was initial resistance to this program on the part of the 
techs, they very quickly realized that there can be a rather lucrative 
compensation for doing really... not much. They are now rather jealous of 
this overtime and don't want me to put our three part time techs on the 
schedule (which was originally discussed when it was thought that the 
incipient program would be too onerous.
I would go on myself were it not for the fact that our HR policy forbids 
exempt employees from being on call in that fashion. 
Bottom line... going on call can be not so bad unless, I guess, unless a 
lab has only one  or two techs.

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Norman Paley
Hackensack, NJ