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In my earlier days of training on a routine checkup of the admitted patient in a general ward, I have been accompanying another nursing student, supervisor and a doctor. During our visit, I had noticed that doctor was not able to profoundly relieve the queries of the attendees of the patients. It is understandable that due to the burden of high in and outflow of patients, the clinician was short on time and had to visit many others. In the matter of time, I stopped to look into the medical record of a patient and did not realize that the team had moved further. The patinet was a 60 years old woman, complex situation who was present at that time without any attendee. She turned to me and began to question me about the treatment progress. With consideration of her old age, seemed very pressing and impatient for getting all the answers. Though I was well aware of the patient’s old record in the file but was not able to express any information on the current status. I told her politely that I am not on the case when she asserted to look into the file and communicate what just the doctor updated as he was very brief on the visit and they were unable to read it. When I tried to read the doctor’s present comment on the file, surprisingly, I was unable to comprehend the writing and began to feel anxious. In the flow of the moment, I told the patient that the writing is quite messy to be read. The remark made her uneasy and a bit furious; she angrily expressed her doubts that if a nurse is unable to read a doctor’s comment then how can you be sure that the patient is been provided with the correct prescriptions. In that moment, a Senior Nurse came forward and took over the hold on that tensed situation. The patient was satisfied with some lengthy discourse and after the arrival of her son, however, the remark about my inability in comprehending the comments correctly made me uneasy for a while and affected my ability to work efficiently for few days. complex situation
Interpretation of the Incident
When I later tried to reason with the events, I had realized that the cases we were visiting on the day were of minor nature. That explained the doctor’s brief visit in the section. However, the part, where I have been unable to decipher the doctor’s comment remained to bug in my mind. It is a popular social believe that doctors tend to have an inconvenient nature of handwriting that is mainly readable to experienced healthcare staff, particularly the pharmacists. A study has indicated that doctors appear to have equally bad handwriting as any other professional. However, a clinician’s handwriting is considered of great importance as it tends to mark great impact on the safety of the patient and quality of the health facilities (Berwick & Winickoff, 1996, p.1657).
complex situation Nonetheless, another study studied the quality of handwriting among the healthcare professionals and asked doctors, nurses and other medical staff from different departments of hospitals to provide with a patient’s script for a testing. They have been told to write as neatly as possible as the script was planned to undergo a computer software testing in order to determine the optical recognition of the written characters. Despite the provided information and request to write neatly, it was recognized that doctors provided with the worst handwritten script in comparison to other staff. It was also noted that doctors appear to write alphabets more poorly and may provide the numbers in a clearer manner (Lyons et al., 1998, pp.863-864).
Feelings
For a few days of the incident, I had the feeling of doubts over my capability of doing my job. Following doctor’s plan and working according to the schedule is a vitality of a nurse’s job. With my inability to comprehend a doctor’s written remark on an unexpected note, triggered anxiety. After a couple of days, I went to some seniors on the field and discussed my lapse in order to fix my comprehension skills in practice. After going through some sittings with the seniors, I realized as doctors somewhat tend to have messy handwriting that becomes easy to understand with time and experience. Discussing the matter with my seniors helped me to restore my confidence in my capabilities and deliver efficiently to my training. Nonetheless, the idea of possible consequences that may arise due to the incorrect comprehension of doctor’s remarks on the file tended to linger on my mind.
Evaluation
The literature states that medical errors of preventable nature occur with high frequency in hospitals. While some errors occur due to system failures, there are many that occur only in response to mismanagement delivered by humans at work. Among many such mishaps, illegible handwriting of a doctor has its fair share of shortcomings. Unreadable handwriting of a clinician has led to medical errors of misdiagnosis and wrong medicinal facilities provided to the patients (Brits et al., 2017, pp.52-55; Edwards & Moczygemba, 2004, pp.329-333; Rodríguez-Vera et al., 2002, pp.545-546).
Medical errors occurring due to medicinal concerns have been ranked…….
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