The Impact Of Illegible Handwriting In Healthcare

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This paper will talk about the sociological impact of doctors’ handwriting on the healthcare practice and profession. This paper aims to explore how the concept of “sulat-doktor” is perceived by healthcare professionals and how it directly or indirectly affects the patient and the healthcare community in the provision of care and treatment. Furthermore, this paper also focuses on the importance of effective communication as a vital function of the healthcare system. In addition, this paper will also discuss the social issues arising from breakdown of communication inside the hospital and in the healthcare practice. For decades, it has been a stereotype for doctors to have bad handwriting. Oftentimes, the illegibility of their handwriting…show more content…
What do you think is the impact of doctor’s illegible handwriting on the patient and the community? 6. What do you think can be done to address this problem? Results and Discussion The impact of illegible handwriting, based from the responses gathered (See Appendix IV), can be summarized into four major social issues on communication: Misunderstanding, Low Quality Care, Health Risks and the Culture of Blame. Illegible handwriting is one of the primary reasons of the breakdown of communication among patients and the healthcare team as it greatly affects the transfer of important information. Doctors and other healthcare professionals interact with each other using different written forms of communication such as patient’s charts that offer health care professionals a record of treatments, investigations and health status of their patients (Manias, 2001) Due to illegible handwriting, healthcare workers find it difficult to read important information written by physicians. Thus, leading to poor communication between doctors, nurses, technicians and…show more content…
In the case previously mentioned, the physician was deemed to be 25% responsible for the error, the pharmacist 75% responsible (Hadridge, 2006). Similar to one of the responses in this study revealed that nurses are often blamed for medical errors and inappropriate interventions. Most often, and in reality, other members of the healthcare team are the ones being held responsible for these errors because they are the ones taking action. However, in some cases, this may not be acceptable since one factor of medication errors include the illegibility of the doctors’ handwriting which makes their orders and prescriptions difficult to read or may simply cannot be read, thus directly affect the provision of care given by the other members of the healthcare
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