What’s up With Doctor’s Handwriting?

Their scribbles are the bane of nurses!

In all my years of nursing, I swear I have seen only a handful of Doctor’s write legibly.

What’s up with that?!

Is it some kind of code? A thing MD’s seem obliged to do to keep nurses on their toes?!

Reading Doctor’s orders is sometimes like trying to put a 20-piece puzzle together: supposedly easy, but profoundly challenging. The number of times I’ve had to read and re-read orders trying to decipher what the heck an MD was trying to say is actually quite disturbing.

I can recall on many occasions the post-op orders doing the nursing ‘rounds’ to see who could figure out exactly what they were asking. Usually, someone could figure it out, based on past experience.

When I was younger, I accepted their atrocious hand-writing as a given; I put Doctor’s on a pedestal. Now that I’m an old, grumpy nurse, I have zero problems calling the MD and asking him/her what s/he actually wrote.

You waste my time; I’ll waste yours.

Doctors are part of a large team that collectively work together to provide safe patient care — and that also includes the housekeeping staff that clean rooms in order to prevent the spread of infection.

We all do our part to protect patients; no one is the Almighty.

As a teacher, we preach to our students about the importance of writing legibly and concisely, respecting the rules of documentation: date; time (of charting); the main focus of the entry; the events charted chronologically using objective and subjective observations; signature and title. No gaps — between lines and at the end of sentences.

I guess the MD’s forgot to attend that lecture!