Patient Care Technician job description for veterans

O*NET's Military Crosswalk maps Navy Hospital Corpsman and Air Force Aerospace Medical Service straight to this occupation, which BLS files under Orderlies, SOC 31-1132. That classification is worth knowing before you compare pay, because the Occupational Outlook Handbook discusses orderlies inside its nursing assistants entry while the wage program keeps them on a line of their own. That line shows $38,290 at the median for May 2025, $32,240 at the bottom tenth, and $50,600 at the top. BLS counted 52,800 orderlies in 2025, and 86 percent of them work in hospitals. The work is moving patients between units by wheelchair, stretcher, or bed, cleaning and carrying equipment, and keeping supplies stocked.

Core Duties and Responsibilities

The job is built around lifting: patients on and off beds, examination tables, surgical tables, and stretchers, alone or with someone helping. Transport to treatment units, testing units, and operating rooms comes next. Then the equipment, disinfected and sterilized between patients, with wheelchairs, hospital beds, and portable machines cleaned and checked and whatever needs repair written up. Technicians also respond to emergency medical calls, security calls, and fire alarms, change bed linens, drapes, and cubicle curtains, and carry messages, documents, and equipment between departments.

Common Skills and Technologies

What the job asks for is ordinary and hard to fake: noticing when a patient is in trouble, and caring enough to act on it. The tools are physical, wheelchairs, stretchers, moveable beds, germicides, and sterilizing equipment, and the only software named is the office kind, used for logs and messages rather than for clinical records.

Education, Training, and Career Path

Almost nine in ten people doing this job gave a high school diploma as their highest credential, and the preparation is light by hospital standards: a few months to a year alongside experienced employees, with no classroom program required. That makes it the shortest route into direct patient contact in a hospital. Related occupations point onward to nursing assistant, surgical technologist, and physical therapist aide work.

Sources: O*NET 30.0, 31-1132.00 Orderlies, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/31-1132.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 31-1132, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes311132.htm.