Tag: interruptions

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Don’t Let Significant Life Events Interrupt Residency!

significant life events

Many of you are guaranteed to have significant life events during your four years. Marriage, family crises, car accidents, and sickness are all part of life. And a four-year period of time is a large enough amount for something huge to change in your life. But, with the daily grind of residency, all these life events can become significantly more complicated. Who has time to be able to leave work at a moment while you are dealing with of myriad of possible life issues? So, what are some of the primary steps you can take to prevent your life from interfering with your work? How can you make sure to preserve your integrity within a radiology residency while these events happen during your radiology residency? Some of these obligations seem like common sense, but this is an excellent checklist for radiology residents. These steps can be easy to forget when life throws you a curveball.

Notify Relevant Faculty

You may be in an uproar because of a challenging event. However, most of your faculty will be understanding. If you are not going to be around because you need to go to court or a funeral, most faculty and attendings will understand. Additionally, you won’t be leaving them in the dust when you don’t show up for work at that time.

Get Coverage

By that same token as above, if you are not going to be around, try to find someone that can take your place if you need coverage for whatever rotation you are on. Now that you are a resident, you need to take responsibility for your actions, and getting coverage shows that you can handle the job.

Find Times That Don’t Interfere With Patient Care

OK. It is certainly not possible to change the time of a funeral. However, you can usually make many critical phone calls, heated conversations, and necessary appointments at times that don’t interfere with patient care. It is merely polite and appropriate to do so. Imagine you were the patient on the other end listening to a personal phone call from your doctor. That whole situation could be a bit embarrassing.

Try To Plan Events With Significant Notice

You can plan some significant life events with notice. Marriages, engagement parties, and meetings to discuss a will don’t have to occur in the middle of a typical workday. Try to plan these events well in advance, so they don’t have to interfere with your training and patient care.

Don’t Assume Everyone Knows Your Significant Life Events

When you are stressed out, not everyone may appreciate your situation. If you feel comfortable telling your colleagues and staff what is appropriate to divulge, let them know what is happening. Most folks will have some empathy for what you are going through at the time. It may even bring you closer to your residency. Most residencies are kind of like a family. Conflicts can arise when people in the family don’t know the issues.

Stay At Home If It Is Needed

Especially nowadays, since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, most faculty have become more sensitive to the issue of staying home if sick or can’t function appropriately at work. And, every once in a while, there is nothing wrong with taking a mental health day. If it makes you able to come back to work soon with renewed strength and attention, it may be worth the day or two that you need for yourself.

Dealing With Significant Life Events During Residency

Four years is a relatively long time to be anywhere, let alone a residency. And personal disasters and happy life occasions/milestones are destined to occur. Some of these events will distract you from the focus of your training. Nevertheless, try to mitigate the effects by following some of these guidelines. Simply telling folks the issues, getting coverage, and finding times to take care of business can make a difference. Following these guidelines allow you to look responsible. And they are ways to ensure that your residency will run more smoothly and without bogging you down with miscommunications and problems during radiology residency. Life interruptions don’t have to ruin your residency experience!

 

 

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Should Radiologists Ignore The Phone?

phone

All told, on any given day as radiologists, we may receive tens of phone calls from our colleagues, technologists, fellow clinicians, administrators, friends, spouses, and patients. We are constantly bombarded with phone calls. So much so that I always wondered about the rate of interruption in a radiology practice. Well, I found one such paper. Confirming my suspicions, a study from Radiology Business(1) looked at 1000 minutes of radiologist observation and found that radiologists were interrupted 94 times or 2.4 minutes per interruption. That sounds about right! So, we are a specialty with lots of distractions.

Some of these distractions can be very important. Others not so much. Regardless, many of us feel obligated to pick up the phone to answer questions and resolve all sorts of issues. However, at what point does a phone call interfere with our concentration? Do these phone calls hamper our performance at the job? Should we always pick up the phone or just let it ring? Or, maybe is it worth our while to hire someone to pick up the phone for us? Let’s look at some of these issues and see if we can develop some suggestions for you, the radiologist or radiology resident, as we peruse the data.

Literature Review On Interruptions In The Workplace

Let’s start with the most general and go to the most specific. We know from multiple sources that distractions can severely hamper correct interpretations. Here are a few of those studies. The first study (2) looked at 54 students creating essays with a control group (no interruptions) and two experimental wings (interruptions during outlining or writing the paper). The authors found that writers reduced the word number and quality in the groups with interruptions.

Another article (3) looked at workers participating in a simulated submarine tracking program. In this study, the researchers interrupted the participants for 20 seconds with a blank screen. They found that the interruption significantly impacted situation awareness. These participants were significantly slower and less accurate in making decisions.

Next, let’s look at some healthcare studies. This point is where it gets even more relevant. An excellent review paper (4) looked at distractions in the healthcare environment. Two of the most pertinent studies discussed in the report included an article that found that drug dispensing errors increased by 3.42% with interruptions. Then, another article showed a relationship between surgical errors and the number of disruptions.

Most relevant to us, a paper referencing radiology residents looked at the error rate of reads. They correlated the error rate with the number of phone calls in any given hour. This study showed a correlation of an increased error rate of 12 percent with each additional phone call received on call. They concluded that telephone call interruptions might negatively impact on-call radiology resident accuracy (5).

Applicability To The Radiologist

So, how applicable is this information to us, the radiologists? Let’s take these studies to heart. We know based upon the literature above that distractions are not so great for essay writing, situational awareness, drug dispensing errors, surgical errors, and most importantly, film reading. These are activities that have a direct relationship to our daily work. I think, therefore, that these studies are directly applicable to our situation.

What Do We Do About The Phone Calls?

Now, this is the million-dollar question. We know that it is part of our job to take phone calls, interact with people, and deal with sticky situations amid our work. However, with this information in mind and the knowledge that interruptions cause problems, we as radiologists reasonably need to mitigate many distractions in the workplace. What does this mean?

Well, perhaps, we should have systems that allow other employees to field some of the administrative responsibilities. Radiologists should not be triaging phone calls. Administrators should ensure that only the appropriate phone calls get to the radiologist’s desk.

In addition, we need to be mindful of the impact of distractions on our work. And we need to make appropriate adjustments. If the phone is ringing off the hook and we don’t have administrators to take these phone calls, perhaps, we should not be trying to answer the phone when we are reading a case. Instead, we should answer the phone only when we have completed reading a study.

Summary

Based upon our whirlwind tour through the world of phone calls, distractions, and our work, we now know that phone calls are a significant issue in our workplace. Next time the phone rings, think twice before you answer it!

 

(1) http://www.radiologybusiness.com/topics/practice-management/quality/highly-disruptive-interruptions-cause-radiologists-lose-focus-reading-room

(2) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018720814531786

(3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26314878

(4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3007093/

(5) Acad Radiol. 2014 Dec;21(12):1623-8. doi: 10.1016/j.acra.2014.08.001. Epub 2014 Oct 3