Hello. I figure this is the group of people closest to actual doctors here. I am a junior in undergrad (but will graduate as a fith year undergrad due to depression issues/changing majors). As a freshman and sophmore I worked (minimal...two days a week) in a pharmacy and now just do it during breaks.
Why do many doctors have bad handwriting?
It is very dangerous.
Here you go (let's use electronic prescriptions instead
):
BMJ 1996;313:1657-1658 (21 December)
Abstract
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.
Introduction
The assertion that doctors have bad handwriting holds an honoured place in traditional lore. According to conventional wisdom, doctors write in a code--a self righteous chicken scratch that is decipherable only by experienced pharmacists and, with luck, by each other. The question of doctors' handwriting, of course, has a serious side with far reaching implications concerning the quality and safety of health care. Some studies have found doctors' medical records and prescriptions illegible, wasteful, and dangerous,1 2 3 4 5 6 7 but we found no evidence on whether poor handwriting is indeed more of a problem among doctors than among other adults. We gathered data on handwriting under controlled circumstances to determine if, among professionals in health care, being a doctor is associated with poorer handwriting.