The Dangers Of Medical Jargon

Practice Nurse Debbie talks about the dangers of using medical jargon in day-to-day practice, covering the importance of clear documentation, patient safety, and safeguarding concerns.

Hello, my name is Debbie and I'm a Practice Nurse in London. Today I'm going to be talking about the dangers of using medical jargon in healthcare.

As we know, healthcare is a very complex industry already. A lot of our consultations, medicine, just everything to do with our health from learning about the brain, the heart, the spinal cord, everything is complex.

Why Being Clear Is Important

A lot of the time as healthcare professionals, we use abbreviations to save time and to communicate with our colleagues. In a day and age where patients actually have access to reading their notes and their medical records, it's very, very important that we are providing clear and accurate documentation.

Even amongst healthcare professionals, sometimes a lot of our notes and the things that we write can be incomprehensible. For example, I had a patient- and this is a very common mistake, a very common error or abbreviation term that as healthcare professional prescribers use- she had antibiotics that she was supposed to be taking two of twice a day.

Now she wasn't sure if she was supposed to be taking two tablets twice a day, so meaning four in the whole day, or two twice a day. So, one in the morning, one in the evening. And little things like that can cause a delay in treatment because she actually mentioned that she hadn't started taking the medication because she just wasn't sure. I had to call the doctor and just double check what he actually meant.

It just causes delays really, which can all be avoided if there's just clear documentation. I think sometimes, like I said before, we do this to save time, but in the grand scheme of things was time really saved having to call the doctor and wait for them to respond, just to get this information when it could have just been documented a lot clearer?

I know it's not always as black on white and some things, it just takes extra explaining even if you write it in the same way. However, as much as we can do as healthcare professionals, we should be doing.

Patient Safety Could Be Compromised

A lot of medical jargon can compromise to a patient's safety. And not just jargon, like I said before, these abbreviations, these shortcuts can also.

As many of you may know, in 2017, there's been an ongoing case of a nurse who gave a medication to a patient with the direction of the doctor. But the problem was that the abbreviation or the short term of these two medications are similar, but one is a sedative, and one is a paralytic medication.

Now this is a big difference. One paralyzes and one just puts you in a sleeping state, and to have made that mistake and given the paralytic medication and her pin is on the line, well, her pin is gone. She's facing, I think life or a prison sentence, I don't remember.

But just little things like that where it could have been written in full, knowing fully well that there are medications that have the same sort of name. Little things like that are so important that we are a lot more vigilant, and I think as healthcare professionals, we need to know what the norm in our practice is or in our work environment.

It's so crucial that we're not compromising patient's safety and their health, simply because we're trying to take shortcuts.

Abbreviations Can Mean Different Things In Different Settings

If you know that you are in a place where a lot of these medications are used, you have to be extra vigilant. Something as small as, for example, in my practice, the term PT stands for patient, whereas somewhere else, PT could mean physiotherapists and we just say physio.

So just little things like that where I'm a lot more conscious there because in general practice, there's a lot of variations that we don't use that the hospital use. So, I cannot come in and say, "Well, in the hospital we do it like this, or we write in this way," it's not going to work.

And like I say, patients have access to these notes. And so, it's so crucial that we're not compromising patient's safety and their health in this way simply because we're trying to take shortcuts.

Safeguarding Concerns

I think it's very important, especially for me, when a patient is maybe under safeguarding or a looked after by child protection, any sort of legal service where I know that there's going to be legal intervention or my notes may be used as a legal document, I would overexplain or I'd overwrite simply because I don't know where my notes will end up.

They're going to use that note, saying that the patient came in on this or that day. If it's missing any information or if it's lacking substance that could be used against me in the court of law because of my shorthand or because of the medical jargon that I was using, non-healthcare professionals are unable to understand what has happened in that consultation.

And it might seem like a waste of time at that time to write so much, but in the long haul it will save time.

Think Long-Term

So as healthcare professionals, let's do our best to find what works for us. I know a lot of the time, especially in practice nursing, typing for ages and ages and ages, it can be very tasking.

But at the end of the day, you have to think to yourself, what is safest in this situation? What it's going to mean in the long run? Because with everything in nursing, sometimes people aren't getting into issues over what's happened today, but it's over what has happened years ago.

And so, we have to think to ourself in the long run, are these notes going to stand?