It's just something I've noticed after going through my medical records the other day. I mean, I've had a lot of different doctors (I've moved around a lot) but I can hardly read anything. What's the deal with that? Does anyone have a theory, as to why that is?
2006-12-15 11:21:40 · 31 answers · asked by Aisha 1 in Health ➔ General Health Care ➔ Other - General Health Care
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.
2006-12-15 11:45:19 · answer #1 · answered by Rasta 6 · 4⤊ 11⤋
1
2016-05-28 06:52:53 · answer #2 · answered by Ester 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Doctor Handwriting
2016-10-07 07:55:19 · answer #3 · answered by ? 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
This Site Might Help You.
RE:
Why do Doctors have such bad handwriting?
It's just something I've noticed after going through my medical records the other day. I mean, I've had a lot of different doctors (I've moved around a lot) but I can hardly read anything. What's the deal with that? Does anyone have a theory, as to why that is?
2015-08-06 12:05:02 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
23
2015-08-18 16:51:17 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
The actual reason that doctors have writing that may not be legible to non-doctors is because when they go through medical school, they have to write notes very quickly. When they are sitting through their classes taking notes, they don't have time to make sure that their handwriting is pretty and neat, they have to worry about getting the information down. Professors teach very fast in medical school and they don't worry about if you wrote the notes or not because their job is to give you the information; it's the student's responsibility to make sure that they have the information. So, after years of writing so much information so quickly, the handwriting just sticks.
2014-04-07 12:50:04 · answer #6 · answered by Kaitlyn 2 · 6⤊ 1⤋
It's because we have to write alot of things very quickly and it just becomes a really bad habit that the law is now trying to break. There are 4 known deaths from patients dying because the pharmacist has misinterpreted prescriptions. The writing may look like a certain drug name but in fact its something else that looks the same but is for another illness and in the 4 cases the wrong medicine actually killed the patient and the doctors did jail time. Now all doctor's are to take a handwriting course by two women who designed this handwriting program just for doctors. And now if medical records are not legible doctor's can be fined. If prescriptions are hard to read the doctor has to write another one.
2006-12-15 11:30:52 · answer #7 · answered by Cash 2 · 16⤊ 2⤋
Some doctors forget the spelling of really hard words so they just cover it up by putting a really bad handwriting.
i mean they are humans too, they tend to forget certain spellings...
2016-05-03 02:42:33 · answer #8 · answered by Angelica 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
My guess is they're probably in a rush most of the time so they don't really bother to worry about messy handwriting. What do you think?
2006-12-15 11:30:04 · answer #9 · answered by definitivamente06 4 · 3⤊ 2⤋
Tell me about it. I work in a health care facility and sometimes I can't read their handwriting.
2006-12-15 11:29:54 · answer #10 · answered by Rommie 7 · 2⤊ 1⤋
I've heard two theories:
1 - it makes it harder to forge prescriptions.
2 - they have to write so much in so little time because they're so busy that it turns out messy. (I think that if they wrote neater they'd eventually get faster.)
They might also just have horrible hand writing. It seems to me that most people have messy handwriting regardless of their profession. But that's just my experience.
2006-12-15 11:34:31 · answer #11 · answered by Anonymous · 10⤊ 2⤋