Doctors' illegible handwriting causes 7,000 deaths in the U.S. every year and another 1.5 million Americans report adverse reactions.
We do not have the numbers of how many people injure or die in Bangladesh due to prescriptions written by doctors that could not be deciphered by shop keepers or pharmacists. But experts assume that a significant number of the prescriptions written everyday might have that problem.
Recently, a movement has begun in Mumbai asking the medical fraternity to write prescriptions in separate and capital letters.
Not just the pharmacists, even nurses could not decipher medicine all the time, its dosage and route of administration that lead to fatal consequences.
The difficulty would be in changing decades of habit. Expert says that the habit of writing in capitals has to begin in medical schools for it to catch on. Initiatives should be taken to help medical fraternity perceive the need to change the habit.
The prescription writing habit is changing worldwide. Almost a third of all the prescriptions in the U.S. are electronic. The e-change occurred after a Cornell University study in 2010 showed that nearly two in five handwritten prescriptions had errors.
Here in our local context, along with writing capital letters, computerised prescriptions wherever possible could lessen the errors including fatal one — death.