How to Build a Quality Culture in Your Radiology Practice

On Building Quality Culture in Your Radiology Practice

Beyond metrics, a radiology practice needs a quality culture that encourages safety and client care. Here’s what you need to know to get there.

Building a successful radiology team can be quite a challenge, can’t it?

You’re focused on helping your patients become healthier. You’re also focused on keeping your team safe.

But, you can’t do it all on your own.

You need to build a culture that pushes your team to perform at their potential. It doesn’t have to be difficult. The tips in this post will help you build a better team and save more lives.

Protect The Staff

In most cases, a radiology practice is hyper-focused on protecting the patient. It’s understandable, right? After all, our patients are entrusting us with their health. It’s our job to keep them safe.

But, what about the staff?

While ensuring the safety of your patients, you also need to ensure the safety of your radiologists and physicians. Your staff needs to be confident that you are doing everything possible to protect them.

This means that you have to be cognizant of the appropriate collimation, positioning, and angling of the radiology equipment. It’s important to make sure you’re decreasing the amount of exposure to your staff. You also need to make sure your staff has the proper protective gears.

Warning signs are also important. These are helpful for reminding the staff of what they need to do to keep themselves safe.

This is key to a safe work radiology work environment. Along with providing your staff with reminders and protective equipment, Radiology practice management services you need to make sure they’re as educated as possible. Protective gear and warning signs won’t do much good if they don’t know how to actively ensure their safety.

Sometimes, radiology workers will already know what equipment they need and the procedures to follow. But for whatever reason, they choose not to follow the proper protocols. Radiology practice management services can also help. You need systems in place to enforce the safety measures you have implemented.

Encourage Collaboration

Building and growing an effective radiology team requires collaboration. You have to work as a team to make sure you’re doing the best work possible. As a team, you have to get better and better at protecting your patients.

There are multiple ways to do this.

Implement a survey that your staff can complete to give you feedback on how well they are performing. You should do this annually. The best insight into your team’s functionality is the team itself. Since they are the ones doing the work, they know what’s going well and what isn’t.

Another helpful idea is to implement programs that encourage staff to report discrepant readings. You can even include rewards for those who code the most exams. You should also enforce a minimum level of peer review participation.

Hold monthly peer review conferences with your staff. Use this to give your staff an opportunity to go over any learning opportunities they have discovered.

It may be a little difficult to get your team members to report errors that the team is making. That’s why you want to create a safe environment where team members can share areas of opportunity for your organization.

Conclusion

Maintaining an effective radiology team isn’t easy, but it can be done. The key is to build a culture that is focused on continuous improvement and a sense of purpose. When your team works together as a cohesive unit, you can save more lives while keeping your staff safe and happy.