[nursinghumor]

http://www.nursefriendly.com/illegible

Found a few interesting articles on the topic.

Doctors Penmanship Sickening - Study:"London - A new study has confirmed what most people already know: Doctors have terrible handwriting. "The age old prejudice people have about doctors' handwriting is actually true," Ronan Lyons, a doctor with the Department of Public Health in Swansea, said in a telephone interview Friday."
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/weird/093098weird.html
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Deciphering illegible handwriting (1): causes and solutions to deciphering illegible handwriting, International Journal of Forensic Document Examiners:"An important aspect of the forensic examination of documents is deciphering or transcribing illegible handwriting in order to comprehend the contents of the document. This is more often required in the case of wills in which the handwriting may be extremely deformed/degraded due to the psychosomatic condition of elderly or sick people. The main methods of deciphering are: the photographic magnifying of the text, microscopic examination, the use of video spectral comparator and scanning by means of a computer. This paper demonstrates some representative cases."
http://static.highbeam.com/i/interna...sandsolutions/

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The handwriting is on the wall for nation's doctors. Penmanship classes helping to make prescriptions legible:"He's a veteran physician who works as a trauma surgeon. Just don't ask Dr. Sheldon Brotman to write a legible prescription. That's why he's here, sitting in a handwriting class at Atlantic City Medical Center, learning how to hold his pen, position his paper and put a sharp angle on his "z" so it doesn't look like an "s." "My signature is always a problem down at the pharmacy," Brotman said."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/docs05.shtml

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Illegible handwriting in medical records, F Javier Rodríguez-Vera MD:"In clinical records many items are handwritten and difficult to read. We examined clinical histories in a representative sample of case notes from a Spanish general hospital. Two independent observers assigned legibility scores, and a third adjudicated in case of disagreement. Defects of legibility such that the whole was unclear were present in 18 (15%) of 117 reports, and were particularly frequent in records from surgical departments."
http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/abstract/95/11/545

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Illegible Handwriting Strikes Again ... by John Dodge, Health-IT World:"There's no shortage of snafu stories in healthcare when it comes to illegible handwriting. The experience I am about to relate was but an annoyance, but I can certainly see where it could repeat itself thousands of times every day across the vast landscape of American healthcare. Undoubtedly, illegible handwriting is one of the major causes of inefficiency when tests or prescriptions are ordered."
http://www.health-itworld.com/enewsa...e000216777.cfm

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In the long run, penmanship classes for doctors won't do much for patient safety, Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP):"With the nation's attention now focused on patient safety issues, television and print journalists frequently cover stories about medical errors. Often, medication errors caused by poor physician handwriting are a common theme. While jokes and cartoons still flourish about illegible prescriptions, the public is personally familiar with this problem, and it is no longer considered a joking matter. Recently, national television networks and wire services have reported a number of efforts that are underway at hospitals across the country to bring doctors back to the classroom for courses in basic penmanship. While we applaud hospitals that seek to improve handwriting through these courses, we fear that such actions will achieve only marginal improvement at first and even less sustained improvement over time."
Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP)
1800 Byberry Rd., Suite 810 Huntingdon Valley, Pa. 19006
Voice: 215.947.7797 Fax: 215.914.1492
E-Mail: ismpinfo@ismp.org
http://www.ismp.org/MSAarticles/handwriting-class.html

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Prescription Mistakes:"Poor legibility of doctors' handwriting may lead to prescription errors and problems with referral letters. Using computer technology to assess handwriting in an objective manner, a British survey compared doctors' handwriting with that of administrative staff and other healthcare professionals. Participants were asked to complete a form that contained boxes for the respondent's name, the 26 letters of the alphabet, and the digits 0-9. They were told that examples of handwriting were needed to test computer software for optical character recognition and were asked to write as neatly as possible"
http://132.183.145.103/forum_2/Porph...ESCRIPTIO.html

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Why is handwriting important? Prescription for Safety, American College of Physicians:"Physicians' handwriting is a source of endless jokes, but illegible orders are no laughing matter. Illegible handwriting on prescriptions takes extra time to interpret, and pharmacist callbacks result in lost time to the practitioner. Tragically, illegible handwriting is a common cause of medical error and has led to patient injury and death. According to a 1997 American Medical Association report, errors related to misread prescriptions were the second most common and expensive malpractice claim over a seven-year period.2"
http://www.acponline.org/ptsafety/faq.htm




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