June 20, 2016 | Barb Carr

Handwriting and RCA

Today’s article is meant to create a discussion. We all know that Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are taking the place of written orders in healthcare (providing their own set of issues), so where does the written word fall on the Root Cause Tree®?

The cartoon below illustrates the issue we are discussing:

Handwriting
Back in the day doctors and nurses always used written records, or prescriptions. Today the reliance on this form of communication is less than in the past but can still cause issues. One question to ask yourself is, “Is the burden of understanding written communication on the writer or the reader?”  What is your opinion on this? Mine is that it is most certainly on the writer. We should not provide communications of any kind that have to be interpreted to be understood. Going back that is why many acronyms have been removed from healthcare…they simply created confusion.

So thinking about written communication, if we have a Causal Factor dealing with a nurse or physician did something wrong due to a misunderstanding of a written communication…where would we go under the “Human Performance Difficulty” section?

One question that would most likely be a yes is the second question under the Team Performance Section: Did failure to agree about the who/what/when/where of performing the job play a role in this problem?. This leads us to Training, Communications, and Work Direction but does that really match?

For this week please provide your insight into where you believe this issue would fit. Thank you for reading and for providing your insight! I will write about our results in next week’s article! Have a great week……

(P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for my Medical track at the 2016 Global TapRooT® Summit, San Antonio, August 3-5, 2016.)

Categories
-->
Show Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *