Enjoying the Ride in Radiology: Who’s in the Car with You?

A couple of weeks ago, I took a road trip to attend a wedding. Under good traffic conditions, it was only about two hours away. We could have just gone home afterwards, but what fun is that? We grabbed a hotel room instead.

Rainstorms showed up the next day, one torrential downpour after another. The interstate got progressively bogged down and, courtesy of my passenger’s cellphone, we learned that an overturned tractor trailer had the road completely closed a dozen or two exits ahead of us.

Rather than determinedly plodding on ahead and hoping things would be cleared by the time we got there, I exited and got busy with GPS, finding my own way on side roads so we would circumvent the troublesome spot. It was a very hands-on process. Some streets had their own traffic issues, and some were flooded to the point of “let’s not try that.” Plus, none were perfectly parallel to our intended route, so I had to zigzag an approximation.

I had driven that section of the interstate a gazillion times over the years. It took at least an extra hour to get home that day compared to a usual trip. If we had just sat in an hour’s worth of traffic, it would have been tedious, even aggravating. Our chosen alternative was an enjoyable, engaging adventure. To borrow a phrase, we adapted and overcame.

That couldn’t have happened if we weren’t on the same page. If one individual in the car failed to be into it, and instead grumbled or vocally worried, the negativity would have been contagious.

This week, I touched base with a colleague from a bygone job and found myself reminiscing about the “could’ve been miserable but was fun” drive. He stayed in that job a while after I bailed, hoping that it would improve, but ultimately also gave his notice and found better circumstances. Along the way, our former employers made some gestures that seemed good on paper but either never quite panned out or materialized in ways with unpleasant catches.

I was unsurprised to hear it. That job had not been a happy car, “let’s enjoy the ride” environment in terms of the rad group or the health-care system around it. Sure, there were good folks. Many were pleasant to interact with or at least professional. However, it doesn’t take too many unsatisfied or disappointed —let alone angry — people to poison the well, and that place had them. When any given interaction has a decent probability of being adversarial, one adapts.

That wasn’t the only job I have held under such circumstances. To be fair, everything is relative. None of my past gigs held a candle compared with my current one, so their flaws are magnified in hindsight. Still, I did leave each of them so how happy could those environments have been?

Of course, some were more unpleasant than others, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that, even in a good environment, a rad (myself included) can create his or her own unhappiness. Defense mechanisms can then project blame for the unhappiness onto the rad’s surroundings. The reason I am dissatisfied with my job isn’t because I had unrealistic expectations of it, but rather because they haven’t catered to my reasonable demands.

Experience (personal growth as well as professional) goes a long way toward nixing and being on guard against the development of self-induced disgruntlement. It also helps one identify and avoid environments that would prove disappointing. A young rad might take on a job thinking that he or she can tolerate this unwanted feature or that, only to find, a year or two down the line, that he or she really cannot do so. A decade or two later, the radiologist might recognize it as a no-go up front.

Remove such impediments and it becomes much easier for rads to “enjoy the ride,” especially if they are working with other rads (as well as referrers and even administrators) who are of a like mind. You can find yourself liking your work, even looking forward to it, which can be a bit surreal if you have previously regarded all work as a necessary evil to make your ends meet.

Not everyone can create that sort of environment. Sometimes, the resources just aren’t there. If you have six rads and you are trying to cover case volume or hours that should really be handled by a team of eight or more, people are going to be stretched thin and/or have the sense that they are not being paid well enough. Still, if they see that real efforts are being made (leadership taking on equal or extra shares of the work burden for instance), it will definitely help.

Sufficient resources aren’t everything of course. They need to be deployed well and a happy car “esprit de corps” doesn’t create itself. It can be stifled by all sorts of pitfalls, many of which I have written about over the years. They’re not hard to figure out. Most rads could rattle off a list of killjoys, and if you shadowed them during a typical workday, they would be able to point out others as they occurred in real time.

They follow a common theme: Give me good tools to get the job done, and a reasonable volume of the sort of work I can capably do. Minimize nonsense that gets in the way of me doing that work. Provide supportive teammates and leadership. Competitively compensate me and give me a path to grow in my career.

Do that for a group of people — like a team of radiologists and the support staff around them (and ideally their referrers as well) — and there is nothing left for them to do but enjoy riding in the car(eer) they have chosen.