Learning from books or the Web (including this site) is the first part of building your knowledge and skill.
But there’s a vital step beyond the written word: learning from your patients and your clinical colleagues.
You can create reports and send them out all day long, but if your reports aren’t useful to the people reading them, you may as well not bother.
How to avoid this? The answer is through feedback.
Feedback could be from you asking the person looking after a patient what happened to them. Was the sputum positive for TB? Did they have an operation? What was the diagnosis at surgery? Did they get sent to a bigger centre?
Sad to say, but that may be a new experience for many of you, and for the people you start asking.
But clinicians, in my experience, are happy to share this kind of information and appreciate that you are showing an interest in their work.
Usually also they will realise that you are asking because you are seeking knowledge that will improve your work. And that’s a good thing for them too.
Or feedback could be from them coming to tell you that you got something wrong.
That can be painful, as I know from many years’ experience, but it’s the best way to learn because you tend to remember your mistakes.
I have been interpreting images for a long time now, but I still get told if a mistake of mine gets found. The most recent of these involved satisfaction of search - I did a great job of seeing and describing the injury to the wrist that was mentioned on the request form, but I missed the patient’s finger fracture.
It was one of those ‘how could I possibly have missed that?’ moments that we do our best to prevent, but which can still happen if you’re not organised.
So I have learnt from that, or at least had a reminder of what I already knew: you have to look carefully at all parts of all the images. Every time.
Because busy clinicians don’t always give you all the information they have, and sometimes they themselves won’t be aware of the second fracture in a patient who is in a lot of pain from an obvious injury.
Without feedback you are operating in a bubble, and not getting information that you need for your professional development. Feedback is oxygen for your professional skills!
So even though it might be hard at first, develop the habit of asking for feedback, good and bad. And learn from it and use it to increase your knowledge and skill.