Does doctors illegible handwriting kill more than 7,000 patients annually?
Dear Cecil: I recently heard a statistic on a radio talk show that in the U.S. alone there are over 7,000 deaths per year due to mistakes made by pharmacists because of the physicians’ illegible handwriting on the prescription! Can this be true? — Don Jones, Berea, Ohio You’d almost hope so, Don, given that Time magazine saw fit to lead with it: “Doctors’ sloppy handwriting,” a January 2007 article begins, “kills more than 7,000 people annually.” (I’d bet Darvon to doughnuts that’s where the radio personality you heard saw it.) But the author may have had some difficulty deciphering his own notes: the actual stat alluded to – apparently from a 1998 Lancet paper via subsequent reports by the Institute of Medicine – is that each year 7,000 U.S. deaths result from all medication-related errors of any sort, inside and outside hospitals, and not just those tied to poor penmanship. Which, of course, is still plenty to ponder while popping your next pill, and there’s more where that came from
