Doctors and crappy handwriting

[hunliang]

Doctors are known for their crappy handwriting, why is that?

No offense to doctors or to be doctors out there, it's just out of my interest and having a bit of fun. And I maybe over-generalising as well. So I do apologise if i really hurt someones feelings here.

I work in a lab in a learning hospital and also a community pharmacy. So i got quite a bit of 'experience' reading doctors handwriting. The intersting thing is that I observed is that new doctors that just got their pen licence usually have pretty decent handwriting, but it will deteriorate over the months and become an unreadable scribble.

I know their are usually busy and do not have time to write everything out clearly. But even so, isn't better to write readable handwriting than some lab staff or pharmacist calling them later to determine what they really want?

:wink:

p.s. I'm not saying other ppl dun have horrible handwriting, I for one has horrible handwriting but at least it is readable...

[taufiq]

I thought that's how we differentiate between an excellent doctor and an average doctor... It's talent you know..

[iQing]

I cant read chinese doctor's handwriting as well

is this something "universal" ?

[youngyew]

I have always wondered the reason too... I guess it's mostly because that they are always short of time (think of the doctor-patient ratio). There are things that doctors always like to do as fast as possible, such as writing, walking about the hospital (I guess doctors must be on average the fastest walkers on the Earth). However, I have heard from some doctors that doctors in emergency occasion should avoid rushing. So it is kinda contradictory there. :P

[nwx86]

This is one of the questions I've always wondered too..
On my experience on doing attachment at the pharmacy of a general hospital, one particular doctor's handwriting was still readable in the morning...but later in that day...it was hard for me to dechiper what was written...however, the ppl working there had no problem dealing with them.
Two things i've learned there...
First, perhaps the crappy handwriting is due to the amount of work doctors hav to deal with..
Secondly, I guess all pharmacists will, sooner or later, learn how to read what is written on the prescriptions...I guess it comes with experience.

[hunliang]

Yea....u will learn to 'decode' wat they r trying to write sooner or later... but there r still times where u can't read wat they r writing.

it is ok for prescriptions and lab requests coz u can work it out and check the patient history and give u a hint. but for patient names and details....it's a horrible experience.

i reckon they should have a 'writing for doctors 101' unit for the entire semester to teach medical students how to write....so they dun start writing like 'doctors' :lol:

either that, or a 'code deciphering techniques' unit to teach pharmacist and lab staff and hospital staff to read doctor's handwriting 8)

btw, med students out there, how's ur handwriting? can u show us a sample?

[alamanda_star]

yeah.. i got an experience...

I was admitted to an hospital last 2 years because I had to undergo an operation as soon as possible.. the nurse at the ward dunno why I was admitted and nobody informed to her anything.. all she got was a file the doctor gave to me to be handed to her.. and she can't read and understand what the doctor had written in the file.. and the worst thing is she asked me, what did the doctor write? :? how on earth I'm suppose to know?? I'm just a high school student at that time...

as a medical student.. some of my friends got a very pretty and neat handwritting... but I think not for me.. hehehe.. I'm lazy to write it nicely because I think it's a waste of time.. During exams, my handwritting is worst.. we have to write so many things in a short time.. so, later we get used with the bad handwritting and later forget how to write with a neat and tidy handwritting already :P ...

However, I have heard from some doctors that doctors in emergency occasion should avoid rushing. So it is kinda contradictory there.

is it? when we visited a hospital last few months, we're given a doctor from emergency department to show us around and we had to run to catch her pace.. she will just dissappear in a split second after she gave her explanation.. :roll:
[/quote]

[apple_dot]

One of my lecturers once told us that, sometimes doctors can just scribble away when they dont know the spelling for those drugs , disease, or parasites name .

So, hows that? :)

[youngyew]

One of my lecturers once told us that, sometimes doctors can just scribble away when they dont know the spelling for those drugs , disease, or parasites name .

So, hows that? :)
Eerm, it's not as bad as you think, I guess. I understand what you mean, but it's not that a doctor would forget the name of your cough mixture and will simply scribble down things like "amelioraugmentin". More likely, say the doctor is supposed to give you a Nifedipine (one of the drugs indicated to hypertension or angina patients)... The doctor may not be able to recall exactly whether it's nifedipine, nefidinpin, nefindiping etc; so in this case, he or she will tend to write thing like n*jiggling*fidepine or something like that.

It's right that doing this may lead to disastrous consequences. In fact one of our tutors told us that there was one case, a nurse were supposed to inject a particular amount of a particular drug, and the amount written by a doctor / nurse (can't remember) was like this:
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/4395/44sm8.gif

What do you guess? 99? 44? 77?

The nurse gave 44 units of drug to the patient, and the patient died. It turned out it was supposedly 4u, or 4 unit of drugs. Having been given 11 times therapeutic dose of drug, the patient was literally killed by the doctor, or whoever who came up with that crappy handwriting.

Perhaps this could show us just how important handwriting is to the healthcare profession. But luckily such mishap is rare, and perhaps will be even less likely to happen in the future following the implementation of electrical records.

p/s: I wrote something about this in my recent blog article here (http://changyang1230.blogspot.com/2006/08/whats-with-doctors-handwriting.html).

[wanicute1988]

is there anyone here that can give me the minimum requiremenr or TER to enter australian unis(melbourne,monash etc) for medicine.thanks in advance.

[youngyew]

is there anyone here that can give me the minimum requiremenr or TER to enter australian unis(melbourne,monash etc) for medicine.thanks in advance.
The minimum TER stated for Melbourne is 99.75, Monash around 97 or 96 (can't really remember). The others are all around 95...

For international students, those numbers aren't really applicable though. In effect, you need at least about 98 in order to enter *any* medical course in Australian universities.

[tehjiao]

Busy.... is one of very important factor
- patients in clinic can be extremely overload, just imagine that in the morninng clinic u need to review over 150 patients by only 5 doctors, and the doctors need to fill in the patient's prescription, investigation lab form, patient notes, x-ray form all by hands....the worst part is , you still have afternoon clinic which start from 2pm which your morning clinic just finish at 2.30pm.........

[sandave]

I guess doctors are actually lazy to write neatly. I also think this is due to the state being busy and some of them are captivated by the previous doctors . There is also a theory about this bad handwritting, usually when a person studies medicine his /her lecturer will talking to fast so they have to scrible in order to write notes and from here all these bad hand writting originates. 8)

[youngyew]

Came across this article: http://www.bmj.com/archive/7072ww3.htm

The truth about doctors' handwriting: a prospective study

Objective--To determine whether doctors have worse handwriting than other health professionals.

Design--Comparison of handwriting samples collected prospectively in a standardised 10 seconds' task.

Setting--Courses on quality improvement.

Subjects--209 health care professionals attending the courses, including 82 doctors.

Main outcome measures--Legibility rated on a four-point scale by four raters.
Results--The handwriting of doctors was no less legible than that of non-doctors. Significantly lower legibility than average was associated with being an executive and being male. Overall legibility scores were normally distributed, with median legibility equivalent to a rating between "fair" and "good."

Conclusion--This study fails to support the conventional wisdom that doctors' handwriting is worse than others'. Illegible writing is, however, an important cause of waste and hazard in medical care, but efforts to improve the safety and efficiency of written communication must approach the problem systemically--and assume that the problems are in inherent in average human writing--rather than treating doctors as if they were a special subpopulation.

( These findings in no way contradict lore and literature about the costs and hazards of poor writing in prescriptions and medical records, but they do refocus the problem. Illegibility in medical care may have less to do with "bad" (that is, exceptionally bad) handwriting among doctors than with handwriting in general as a form of communication.)

[tehjiao]

Came across this article: http://www.bmj.com/archive/7072ww3.htm

The truth about doctors' handwriting: a prospective study

Objective--To determine whether doctors have worse handwriting than other health professionals.

Design--Comparison of handwriting samples collected prospectively in a standardised 10 seconds' task.

Setting--Courses on quality improvement.

Subjects--209 health care professionals attending the courses, including 82 doctors.

Main outcome measures--Legibility rated on a four-point scale by four raters.
Results--The handwriting of doctors was no less legible than that of non-doctors. Significantly lower legibility than average was associated with being an executive and being male. Overall legibility scores were normally distributed, with median legibility equivalent to a rating between "fair" and "good."

Conclusion--This study fails to support the conventional wisdom that doctors' handwriting is worse than others'. Illegible writing is, however, an important cause of waste and hazard in medical care, but efforts to improve the safety and efficiency of written communication must approach the problem systemically--and assume that the problems are in inherent in average human writing--rather than treating doctors as if they were a special subpopulation.

( These findings in no way contradict lore and literature about the costs and hazards of poor writing in prescriptions and medical records, but they do refocus the problem. Illegibility in medical care may have less to do with "bad" (that is, exceptionally bad) handwriting among doctors than with handwriting in general as a form of communication.)

Nice article. Thanks for sharing.