If you haven’t had a discrepancy with the covering morning radiologist as a resident on call, then one of you encountered one of three outcomes. You either haven’t read enough cases. Two, you are the long-lost great-great-grandson of William Roentgen; Or finally, perhaps your name is Watson, the artificial intelligence computer, and you work for IBM!!!
The truth that very few attendings seem to admit is that everyone, including themselves, will miss something every once in a while. One study reported radiologists clinically miss something important between 2-20% of the time. (1) From my experience, that number looks pretty high, but the rate is significant enough. So, when, and notice, I don’t say if you miss something and have a discrepancy at night, you are an ordinary radiology resident. I would even go as far as to say that you are fortunate, in a sense, because you didn’t miss the finding as a full-fledged attending. You have someone to back you up, and hopefully, you will never forget that finding again.
Accepting The Inevitable Discrepancy!
The first step, of course, is to prevent major misses. The cases you need to study leading up to taking calls are the cases that are common and lead to significant morbidity and mortality. You want to view hundreds of different types of appendicitis, aortic ruptures, pulmonary emboli, and so forth so that when the time comes for you to take a call, the chance of missing the critical finding is significantly lower. Unfortunately, however, we can’t prevent all the inevitable misses, and frankly, we have to admit to ourselves first and foremost that this will be the case.
So, what do you do when you have a significant miss? Maybe you sent a patient home with acute appendicitis or a patient with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Perhaps you missed an early retroperitoneal bleed. There are specific keys to making the discrepancy in any of these cases, not just another horrible encounter, but rather a learning experience that is valuable for the remainder of your career. We will go through a few rules that you need to follow in the rest of this chapter.
Don’t Perseverate Over The Discrepancy
The first important point is how you emotionally react to the discrepancy. It is also a life lesson. We can’t undo what you did. You need to move on… Perseverating on a miss is counterproductive at best and, even worse, can cause future misses. Remember, just because you made a significant miss does not mean you are or will be a horrible radiologist. So, you need to get over it. The same rules apply to questions on written exams, future failures, etc. One miss does not a radiologist make!
Make Sure To Follow-up The Patient In The Morning
When you find out about the bad news, it is inappropriate to leave the department sulking, not attempting to make good on the miss you made. Try to do what you can to make sure that the physicians in the emergency room know there was a discrepancy. Or, you may need to call the patient back yourself, if need be. Bottom line… You need to make an effort to clean up your mess. It is partially your responsibility.
Read All You Can About the Miss To Not Make the Mistake Again
Reading about the disease, reviewing the films, looking at other similar cases: These are all the things you should be doing soon after the miss. This miss is a real opportunity to understand and fix the incomplete knowledge you had on the subject before, and, of course, to never make the same mistake again.
Teach Others
One of the most rewarding ways of compensating for the discrepancy is to make your fellow residents and junior residents aware of the miss. Teaching your colleagues protects them from making the same mistake that you have made. And, even better, it reinforces the knowledge you have, thereby making it much less likely that you will repeat the same mistake. Just like lightning, it rarely strikes twice!!!
Learning From Midnight Discrepancies
Midnight discrepancies are part of the everyday learning ritual for a radiology resident. It is not the discrepancy itself that is a problem. That is expected and is part of the typical routine residency learning experience. But instead, the issue is how you as a radiology resident learn and grow from the experience. Make the best of a challenging situation!!!
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3609674/ Discrepancy and Error in Radiology: Concepts, Causes, and Consequences
