Compliance (COMmunicate PLease wIth Less Abbreviations, Noun Clusters, and Exclusiveness)

Do multidisciplinary team members correctly interpret the abbreviations used in the medical records?

Background and Aims

Abbreviations are commonly used in the medical world to save time and space whilst writing in the patients’ case notes. As various specialties have evolved, each has developed a collection of commonly used abbreviations within its practice, which may not be easily recognisable to those working as an allied branch. The purpose of this study was to assess whether we, the multidisciplinary team members, interpret the abbreviations used in the medical records correctly?

Methods and Results

We analysed orthopaedic inpatient admission case notes (n = 45) for the use of abbreviations (n = 57) and their appreciation by different members of the multidisciplinary team (n = 175) by means of a standardised questionnaire. We found a wide variation in understanding and interpretation of orthopaedic abbreviations among health care professionals. Even the orthopaedic surgeons could answer correctly 57.2% only, followed by physiotherapists (49.9%). Non-orthopaedic groups produced significantly less number of correct answers than the orthopaedic surgeons (p <0.019). Interestingly, nursing and physiotherapy departments produced significantly fewer mal-interpretations than the orthopaedic surgeons (p <0.023).

Conclusions

Whilst abbreviations may indeed save time, the use of confusing abbreviations is unacceptable. We recommend that acronym obsession should be discouraged in order to reduce possible clinical error.

A guide for writing in the scientific forum

BACKGROUND

When considering the importance of scientific writing in disseminating new discoveries and ideas, it is quite remarkable that few physicians have received any formal instruction in this essential process.

METHODS

This article focuses on the fundamental principles of scientific writing that also include a "style and grace" component.

RESULTS

The art of good scientific writing is to convey scientific materials in a clear and interesting way, while avoiding incomprehensible sentences that only serve to disguise marginal contents within the article.

CONCLUSIONS

The goal of this article is to encourage authors and readers to critically examine the art of scientific writing to overcome the barrier to effective communication.

A Clarity Clinic for Surgical Writing

Although writing and publishing are key to career development and academic success for surgeons, learning the skills needed to write publishable research reports is an often neglected aspect of surgical training. This report distills several lessons from scientific writing courses for surgeons taught at the University of California, San Francisco, to give a wider audience of academic surgeons tools they can use to write scientific prose more clearly. Drawing extensively on real examples of surgical writing, we cover techniques that are indispensable for achieving clarity, including choosing words carefully, designing well-constructed sentences, building structured paragraphs, and displaying your thinking clearly by using topic sentences and transitions.