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The ability to communicate ones thoughts to others clearly and concisely is a cornerstone of any peoples collective activity. For this reason, miscommunication leads to misunderstanding, which, in turn, negatively impacts the outcome of the work. Mistakes related to the exchange of information in the medical sphere, however, are additionally associated with serious risks of causing severe harm to patients. Therefore, healthcare professionals must reduce the number of miscommunications and the primary aspect of doctors interaction that should be under control in this regard is the usage of abbreviations.
Medical workers should be aware of the shortened versions of words and phrases that can potentially be interpreted wrongly. Glassman (2013) argues that nine abbreviations should be excluded from usage by medical workers. They include using U for units, IU for International Unit, Q.D. for once daily, Q.O.D for every other day, and the usage and not usage of trailing and leading zeroes accordingly, to name a few. As such, the usage of these abbreviations can pose a threat to a patients health and life. For instance, IU can be mistakenly read as IV (intravenous), or µg (micrograms) can be interpreted as mg (The Brooklyn Hospital Center, n.d.). Moreover, when trailing zeroes are added, there is a high chance that another person will not see a decimal point at, for example, consider 2.0 to be 20. Such a mistake can lead to the patient overdosing with a threat to the personal well-being. Additionally, such abbreviations as AU, AS, and AD can be mistakenly viewed as OU, OS, and OD, which may lead to eye damage.
On the other hand, abbreviations that stand for well-known diseases such as HIV, AIDS, and ADHD can be actively used as there are almost no reported cases of their misunderstanding. In a similar vein, prescribers can use such abbreviations as t.i.d. (three times daily), Pr (per rectum), po (peroral), and p.c. (after meal) without the fear of being misunderstood. Finally, it is also safe to use more commonly used abbreviations including, for instance, std. (standard) and approx (approximately). Those shortened versions of words and phrases are non-dangerous because their interpretation rarely deviates from the intended meaning.
References
The Brooklyn Hospital Center. (n.d.). Graduate Medical Education: Medical abbreviations. Web.
Glassman, P.A. (2013). The Joint Commissions do not use list: Brief review (New). Semantic Scholar. Web.
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