Orissa HC Comes Down Hard On Doctors For Illegible Handwriting
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2024-01-12 16:13:47
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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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It is good that the Orissa HC has issued a directive to the state government to ensure that all doctors in the state write prescriptions, post-mortem reports and other official documents and communications legibly. Although the court's order was necessitated by the fact that the bench could not read the hand-written post-mortem report submitted by a doctor, it is a fact that doctors write almost as if they are uneducated or it is a huge effort for them. Their handwriting has always been the butt of many jokes and has been often compared with the result one will get if one dips an ant in an ink bottle and leaves it on a plain sheet of paper.
Apart from the difficulty in reading what is written by a doctor, the illegibly written prescriptions can lead to supply of wrong medicines which in turn can lead to adverse drug reactions or side-effects and even death in extreme cases. In case of post-mortem reports, it can lead to a guilty person escaping punishment or an innocent one getting wrongly punished, although it is unlikely to happen as the court will verify it by summoning the doctor and asking him to explain in person. But the chances of the court deducing an erroneous inference from an illegibly written report are always there.
In any case, doctors do not have any excuse for not writing legibly. The popular belief that a pharmacist is able to read what doctors write is misplaced for sometimes even pharmacists are stumped by the handwriting of some doctors. Since it can be a matter of life and death, there should not be even one wrongly fulfilled prescription. Even the Medical Council of India had warned doctors in this regard in the past. Not only the Odisha government but the Centre and all state governments must crack the whip and ensure that doctors either give printed prescriptions and post-mortem reports or write legibly, preferably in all-caps, as the Orissa HC suggested in its order, although some conscientious doctors have already started doing so.
