The Rules of Radiology by Paul McCoubrie

Author:Paul McCoubrie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030652296
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

P. McCoubrieThe Rules of Radiologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65229-6_27

27. Rule #27 / / Don’t Answer The Phone

Paul McCoubrie1

(1)North Bristol NHS Trust, Bristol, UK

Paul McCoubrie

Email: [email protected]

It is not for you. The more you answer the phone, the more it rings. Even if it is for you, it isn’t a social call. Ignoring it encourages face-to-face consultations. These are better for clinical care and certainly a lot more fun for the radiologist.

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When I was a fresh-faced house officer, face-to-face conversations with a radiologist were the only type of interaction possible. If you wanted anything other than a plain radiograph, it needed discussion. Your request would languish in the ‘routine’ tray until you spoke to a radiologist. So if you wanted your inpatient CT this month, you needed to speak to a radiologist.

Raising a radiologist on the phone wasn’t a starter. They were busy people who did not simply drop what they were doing to speak to a clinician. It was nothing personal, just the way it was. If you wanted to speak to a radiologist, you had to go and find one.

The first step was to navigate around the back rooms of the radiology department. Most radiology departments had grown over decades without any planning all, sprawling around the hospital like a drunk octopus. It wasn’t deliberately done to confuse interlopers, just haphazard multiple phases of building.

Consequently, once you stepped away from the waiting room, you discovered a veritable maze. I spent hours wandering down vaguely familiar but increasingly dark and small corridors. At one stage I considered spooling a reel of string behind me, as I plunged into the bowels of the radiology department, half expecting a Minotaur at it’s heart (Fig. 27.1).

Fig. 27.1Half expecting a minotaur at its’ heart

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