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The Dangers of Using Inappropriate Medical Abbreviations

The medical profession has a large number of abbreviations for everything from medicines to commonly used patient information and phrases. While these abbreviations certainly save time and can expedite care, they can also cause a multitude of problems. Abbreviations for differing medicines can be mistaken, many abbreviations are obscure or even created by individual doctors, and others can mean more than one thing.

  1. Drug Confusion

    • As noted in the AllBusiness medical practice blog, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies notes over 7,000 deaths a year are a result of medication errors largely resulting from missed doses and wrong medications as a result of confusing abbreviations. Medications are all potentially dangerous, especially in large doses, so it is crucial to not only administer the correct drug but also in the exact correct amount. Unfortunately, abbreviations can be confused not only between different medications but also between what's a medication and what's a measurement.

    No Standardized Abbreviations

    • There are whole lists of abbreviations that have been compiled by multiple organizations in an attempt to standardize medical abbreviations. Unfortunately, this has not solved the problem as hospitals and universities that bother to adopt a standardized list have many to choose from and there is no rhyme or reason for selecting one over another. While most medicines, procedures and patient information are standard across the board, there are important differences between them that can result in confusion. To compound the problem, many doctors develop their own abbreviations. Medical News Today noted that in a study of diabetes patients charts, five percent contained notes using the doctors' unique abbreviations.

    Limited Abbreviations

    • Because abbreviations are necessarily short and there are only so many letters, many abbreviations come to stand for several things. Flipping through any reference of medical abbreviations, it won't take long to find a single abbreviation with more than a handful of meanings. This can, and sadly does, lead to confusions about medications. When combined with doctors' notoriously sloppy handwriting that can easily confuse letters like an "i" and an "l", the problem quickly compounds.

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