Professor examines importance of a safety plan

A recent editorial on the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) website examined why all radiology clinics and departments should establish and maintain a safety plan.

“Safety comes from expertise,” Christopher Hess, MD, PhD, UCSF associate professor, chief of neuroradiology, and associate chair for quality and safety, wrote in the editorial. “For a radiology clinic or department, that means not just the institutional memory of having performed multiple procedures, or even just each member of the radiology team’s individual experience. Those many levels of experience should be actively incorporated into a continually reviewed and applied safety plan. And team members who serve patients day in and out must be empowered to act on that plan.”

Hess also detailed other ways to be as careful as possible when treating patients, including consulting with referring physicians and personally checking with the patient to see how they feel.

“Finally, perhaps most critically, the patient’s experience must be taken into consideration,” Hess wrote. “When a patient comes to UCSF Radiology with back pain, we ask where the pain is and mark that before the scan. A quarter to half the time, we will see something in the scan that suggests a different treatment approach. This not only saves future scans, but gets the patient feeling better right away.”

Click below to view the full text on the blog section of the UCSF department of of radiology & biomedical imaging website.

In addition, other blog entries written by the department, including a retrospective piece about RSNA 2015 in Chicago, can be found here.