Out of house radiology - Good or Bad

We don't have in house radiologists overnight and the films and CTs are sent to Minnesota.

I felt bad for one of my patients who was a construction worker who fell down one floor and whose spine and left leg I pan scanned. There were problems all night with the radiologists receiving the C-spine CT and T-spine CT. So this guy had to sit in a C-collar around 10 hours while I constantly went back and forth to radiology asking what was the problem.

Finally one of the techs in our department got my guilt trip. I explained to him how the inability of our department to get the CTs to the out-of-house radiology was making the entire system suffer, including the patient who was in an uncomfortable C-collar, the nurses who were responsible for him, me, the other patients whose bed he was taking up, etc, etc. When my tirade was over, I shook the tech's hand to let him know I wasn't his enemy just a concerned person. Somehow this did it. Within 20 minutes, I called back the radiologist, who had received the films and who read them right away.