People and history

Walk into an imaging department and the names on the doors can be confusing. Three quite different things are routinely muddled together: the profession someone practises, the title the law protects, and the role that regulations assign for a given examination. A person can hold all three, but they are not the same thing, and the distinctions matter when questions of accountability arise.

Profession, protected title, and role

The profession is what a person trains in and does every day. The protected title is a matter of statute: the HCPC states that "the professions we regulate have one or more designated titles that are protected by law" and that "to use one of these titles, an individual must be registered with the HCPC". For radiography, the protected titles listed on the HCPC professions page, updated on 12 May 2025, are "Radiographer", "Diagnostic radiographer" and "Therapeutic radiographer", within a register covering fifteen professions in total. The role, by contrast, is not a job title at all. Under IR(ME)R 2017, the referrer, the practitioner and the operator are functions allocated through an employer's written procedures, and regulation 17, together with Schedule 3 on adequate training, ties these functions to training rather than to a particular job.

The sonographer exception

Sonography sits outside this framework, and that is the point most often misunderstood. The Society of Radiographers is explicit: "the sonography workforce is currently unregulated and the title 'sonographer' is not a legally protected one", and sonographers working in the United Kingdom "come from many different professional backgrounds", against a backdrop of a national shortage. The NHS, on its ultrasound scan page dated 25 February 2025, uses a deliberately generic formulation, saying that "a healthcare professional will do the scan". So a sonographer may well be a registered radiographer, or come from another background entirely, but the sonographer title itself carries no register and no statutory protection.

Why the roles cut across the professions

Because IR(ME)R 2017 defines the practitioner as the one who justifies an exposure and the operator as the one who carries out practical aspects, a radiographer, a radiologist or a medical physicist can each occupy different roles on different occasions, provided the employer's procedures say so and the training requirements are met. The medical physics expert illustrates this blending of profession and legal function: the regulations describe an individual or group "having the knowledge, training and experience to act or give advice on matters relating to radiation physics applied to exposure, whose competence in this respect is recognised by the Secretary of State". Regulation 14 on expert advice, regulation 7 on clinical audit and regulation 17 on training all attach duties to these roles regardless of the holder's profession.

What this section covers

The two pages that follow take these threads separately. The first sets out who does what, from clinical radiologists, described by the Royal College of Radiologists as "specialist doctors trained to read and interpret medical images", through radiographers operating the equipment, to the physicists, engineers and technologists represented by IPEM. The second traces the history of the institutions, including a professional body founded in 1920 and a college that today describes itself as the leading membership body for clinical radiology and clinical oncology. For the legal definitions themselves, the section on IR(ME)R 2017 sets out the regulations in full.

The other doors of the publication: Scans explained, Having a scan and Radiation and safety. Every one of them points back to modalities at a glance.