Dangers of Hand written orders

HOME	Dangers of hand writing orders
Tip: When your doctor hands you a prescription, stop and read it. If you cannot read the writing, kindly ask the physician to reprint a neat prescription. Tip: When your doctor hands you a prescription, carefully listen to the name of the medication and the instructions for taking the medicine. If you are unclear, ask the doctor to repeat the name of the drug and the instructions until you fully understand them.	There is no reason for the practice of hand written orders to continue until full computerization is implemented. Consumers must start immediately and reject any prescription that they cannot read. The consumer has the right to ask the physician to legibly print another prescription. If even 20% of patients started to demand this practice tomorrow, it would change the practice of illegible handwriting. Physicians would not want to be rewriting prescriptions. People can sometimes feel intimidated when the doctors hands them a prescription. This is the very moment that the patient needs to speak up and reject the prescription, no matter how the doctor reacts. It is the patient’s medicine and it is the patient who will be the recipient of an error caused by bad handwriting. Hospital medical executive committees should implement an immediate revocation of hand written and illegible physician orders. There is no reason, ever, that one more patient should be harmed because of this practice.	An RN Speaks Out - A registered nurse wrote into a state nursing publication with his comments about the 2003 JCAHO mandatory patient safety practices, which did not address handwritten orders. “When I read, 'Safety First, JCAHO introduces New Patient Safety Goal', my blood began to boil. As a nurse on a hospital medical floor, there is no doubt in my mind that the greatest potential threat to our patients’ safety is physicians’ poor handwriting. Three or four times each shift, physicians’ leave behind orders in utterly indecipherable scrawl. Nurses and pharmacists are left squinting at this gibberish and conferring among themselves to guess words, to figure out whether we have a 3 or 5 here or to divine the physician’s reasonable intent since his penmanship is illegible. Besides the obvious danger of miscommunication about treatment and medications, vital patient care is delayed as we struggle to interpret the scribbling or wait for a physician to return the telephone page to clarify a stat scratched order”(Nurseweek Editorial)