Ben Abdelaziz Ahmed, Gaha Khaled, Mhamdi Yamina, Gaha Rafika, Ghannem Hassen
Service d'Epidémiologie et de Statistiques Médicales, Centre Hospitalo-Universitaire Farhat Hached de Sousse, Sousse, Tunisie.
Therapie. 2005 Mar-Apr;60(2):117-23. doi: 10.2515/therapie:2005016.
A medical order is a medical and legal document; careful writing of this document enables the reduction of many therapeutic errors.
The objective of this study was to evaluate the quality of order writing in Tunisian primary healthcare centres.
This was a transversal descriptive survey of 2586 medical orders. The quality of the writing was assessed using two parameters: its legibility and the information delivered in it.
Among the main results, 36% of orders contained at least 50% of the items retained, 25% of orders were completely illegible, and the quality of writing was considered good in 14% of cases.
The study showed that hand-written orders in primary healthcare are far from complying with the medico-legal requirements. The teaching of order-writing technique and its computerisation are needed to improve the quality of medical prescribing.
