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Why Doctors Have Sloppy Handwriting?

Do you remember the last time you went to the doctor and left with a prescription that, no matter how hard you tried, you weren’t able to figure out what it said? Well, you are not alone.

Photo: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Study by the medical journal BMJ shows that only 1 out of 4 doctors get a good or excellent rating for their handwriting. The remaining 75% basically writes just like the examples A and B in the picture below:

The sentence reads: “Quality Improvement is the best thing since sliced bread.”
Representative writing samples with complete agreement on scores among four raters: sample (A) is poor, (B) is fair, (C) is good and (D) is excellent.

But why is that happening? (the article continues after the ad)

The journal concluded that this is happening mainly for 2 reasons. The first one is that sloppy handwriting comes from the extreme workload. The more patients fill up that waiting room, the less time the doctor has to write the prescription and so the quality of their handwriting decreases.

But it’s the second one that caught our eyes.

Some doctors admitted that they developed their terrible handwriting because they believed that… doctors are supposed to have bad handwriting. This led to the conclusion that some doctors simply write bad on purpose!

If we combine this with the fact that Doctors’ Awful Handwriting Kills More Than 7000 People And Injures 1.5 Million Annually, this is an issue that has to be immediately addressed. 

If you like what you read, then you will definitely love this one: This Is The Reason Why Doctors Wear Blue Or Green Scrubs


Photo: orion creatives, Unsplash
Photoshop: I’m A Useless Info Junkie

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