Many doctors have an illegible and atrocious handwriting making it a global issue regardless of their designation, position and specialty. The problem is a nuisance to patients and it can cause serious injuries. It can also influence patients to take the wrong medication and dosage, unnecessary discomfort and tests. Moreover, pharmacists can dispense wrong medication to patients and expose them to a risk of developing complications. Illegible prescription may arise due to many factors such as busy work schedule which influences doctors to write in a hurry. They tends to use abbreviations including popular and non-popular, where some are not-approved creating room for confusion. Prescriptions needs to be written with a permanent ink while avoiding ambiguities such as decimal points. Use of nonstandard units such as tablespoons or teaspoons has been influencing errors during the prescription process. These issues results in an increase in the number of calls as pharmacists attempts to seek clarification from doctors before dispensing medicines. Misspelling and omission of some words is a major issue of concern affecting successful dispensing of medication in handwritten prescriptions.
Illegible handwriting error are responsible for many medication errors in health facilities. A mistake that may appear simple such as placing the decimal point in the wrong place can have a devastating outcome since the patient could either receive an overdose or under dose. This problem is associated with diverse medical errors including unauthorized drugs, wrong timing, prescribing, wrong dose preparation, as well as administration errors. Illegible prescription can also results in the administration of drugs to the wrong patient, incorrect route of administration, wrong rate, and extra dose. In many cases, pharmacists and nurses are unable to understand writing shortcuts that doctors use when writing in a hurry. This influences them to make their best guess exposing patients to a risk particularly those in dire emergency needs. They are left in a dilemma in case doctors are not available for clarification.
The problem can be resolved by the adoption of electronic prescription where every detail is typed. This would enable prescribers to details to the pharmacy direct eliminating transcription errors. It would also improve completeness and legibility of important information. These systems would influence the use of decision-support tools including drug-allergy, drug-dose, and drug-drug interactions checking. Electronic prescription can lower incidences of medication errors by at least 50% and promote patient safety and quality of prescribing. The outcome would be reduced order-processing time and health care costs.