Northern Health vice president of medicine Dr. David Butcher is welcoming a plan to improve the oversight of new radiologists following a review that found misdiagnoses led to three deaths and harm to nine other patients.
The plan, in part, calls for a stepped-up process of assuring a certain number of images are reviewed by a second radiologist.
"Most of our radiologists already work in groups where that happens but those kinds of quality assurance exercises tend to be on an ad hoc basis so we'll be having to adapt our process to a provincial process," Butcher said.
"It gives us a larger pool of radiologists to draw from for quality assurance and probably more consistent assurance as to the level of quality assurance activity, so we welcome the recommendation."
The recommendation comes out of a report put forward by Dr. Doug Cochrane, the chairman of the BC Patient Safety and Quality Council.
Cochrane was appointed to review thousands of scans by four unqualified radiologists after the ministry was alerted in February to discrepancies in scans found as far back as October 2010.
Cochrane found three died and another nine patients were harmed, which prompted health minister Mike de Jong to publicly apologize to their families and to the others who faced the stress of not knowing whether their diagnoses were correct.
The four were working in Comox, Powell River and the Fraser Valley. However, one of those radiologists worked in Dawson Creek in June 2010 which prompted a review by Northern Health. It found that of 100 CT scans read by the radiologist, seven had "significant discrepancies,"although not enough to change treatment by the physician.
Three of the radiologists are no longer working in B.C. and the fourth is working under the guidelines he has been licensed under.
Cochrane singled out failures of the accreditation and review processes of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and B.C.'s health authorities as one of the main problems.
Butcher said the radiologist who worked in Dawson Creek was working as a locum, filling in for another radiologist, and so, issues with the person would not have been detected by Northern Health.
"We will be working with the other health authorities, as per the minister's action plan, to implement some standardization of how we share information and the types of information we collect when we appoint somebody to our medical staff," Butcher said.
- with files from The Canadian Press
