The excuse that isn’t enough time to do it right just won’t wash. This site about Poor handwriting makes the following statement; “Virtually all of the prescriptions issued each year in the United States are written by hand. Indecipherable or unclear prescriptions result in more than 150 million calls from pharmacists to physicians, asking for clarification, a time-consuming process that could cost the healthcare system billions of dollars a year in wasted time.”
So it looks like you guys are saying is that doctors don’t have the time to write clearly, but do have time to spend clearing up the confusion later.
But then we get this site that says pharmacists are also Too Busy and reports that: " ‘Pharmacists have the tremendous pressure of volume and numbers,’ says Dr. Raymond Woosley of Georgetown University Medical Center. ‘So they have to get them out. That means they take less time to look at the prescription. They’re less likely to double-check or triple-check to make sure that’s the right drug the physician wanted.’ "
Which tells me that the checks on mistakes that are claimed to exist, i.e. the pharmacist’s calls for confirmation, also might not be there.
And this site suggests that it isn’t just talk but that there is a Real Problem out there, reporting that in a study of one outpatient facility, “the error rate for handwritten prescriptions was 34%.”
And you know what your post sounds like to me Qadgop the Mercotan? It seems that you are saying that with your extensive education and considering how busy, and by implication how important, you are, you just can’t be bothered to do it right the first time. But, of course, I realize that it should be obvious to me that you don’t give a damn what I think.
If you wish to imply things I did not say, I suggest you take this either to the pit or email.
And if I didn’t give a damn what you thought, I wouldn’t have responded in the first place. However, my concerns about what you think are an extremely low priority for me, given the other constraints on my time.
If my explanation that “we’re human, and we try to do the best we can” is not something you’re willing to believe, then there’s nothing more of use I can tell you.
Or perhaps you couldn’t be bothered to read his post more carefully, because it looks to me like he was saying that yes, he does try hard to be legible but every now and then someone can’t read his handwriting and it has to be cleared up. I just spent 6 years working in a doctors’ office and heck, occasionally people would ask me what I’ve handwritten and I have neat handwriting! It really does seem to be the issue that it’s because this is one of the few cases where you deal with someone’s handwriting - take a look at a handwritten dinner check from a busy restaurant some time and see how confusing that looks. I had to see handwritten notes by non-physicians often during the course of my work (parents asking for things from us, other people at the medical center, and so on), and in my experience the non-physicians had an equal chance at having poor handwriting.
Some physicians do develop sloppy writing, or never wrote clearly. Occasionally, yes, prescriptions do have to be clarified. In my six years of work I can only think of a handful of occasions where a pharmacy called us on that sort of an issue - perhaps under 10 times - and a couple of the physicians in that office had horrible handwriting. They just, like most other physicians I would think, took care to write carefully when needed.
I too have experienced LurkMeister’s phenomenon. I used to work at a cancer research center and spent my days with my nose buried in medical records. I worked with a handful of physicians and became familiar with each of their styles of chicken scratch. I even became the go-to guy for the indecipherable (“you see, up there is the cross for the T and the dot for the i is over here above the n and this bumpy thing here is actually a z”).
Besides that, there’s a whole lexicon of acronyms, abbreviations, and symbols that wouldn’t be familiar to most people.
I think that my post might have been a little harsh and I regret that. However, in my defense I must say that the statement, "What, you think I spent 4 years of college, 4 years of med school, and 3 years of residency studying freaking penmanship? - signed Qadgop the Mercotan," isn’t the ideal way to open a message that is intended to convey useful information.
Your 6 years of experience is anecdotal and might or might not reflect the extent of experience in the field. For example, when we enter into a new field and first go to work we adopt the mores and standard operating procedure that we find there. Pretty soon things that would stand out sharply to any outsider who is not trying to “learn the ropes” aren’t even noticed any more. Nothing you said addresses the claims made in the cites I gave about the cause, extent or seriousness of the problem of mistakes im medication. Many of them are a result of indecipherable scribbling, maybe because the pharmacist thought he or she was so familiar with that doctor’s scribble that a call wasn’t necessary.
Citing illegible resaurant dinner checks is just the old argument, “Yes, we’re bad but those guys over there are even worse so leave us alone.” Such an argument is totally irrelevant. For one thing it just isn’t possible to equate the damage from a possible cashier’s misreading of a dinner check to that from a pharmacists possible misreading of a prescription.
I will return to my statement way up at the top - medical schools could really use more emphasis on quality assurance in the curriculum. And that means the quality assurance of the whole process, a major part of which is tranferring the information from one individual to another on what medicine that is prescribed.
Once again, I regret the harshness of my post and won’t do it again - probably.