cursive
d o c t o r o n a s o a p b o x D r . c h r i s p e n g i l ly
Dr. Chris Pengilly is Just For Canadian Doctors’ current affairs columnist. Please send your comments to him via his website at drpeng.ca.
nostalgia (or not?) for cursive
Do we care if cursive writing goes the way of the dodo?
I
recently had a patient tell me how she had had to fight with her sons’ school in order that her children be taught cursive writing (also referred to as script, joinedup writing, joint writing, running writing or handwriting). My first reaction was of outrage, but upon reflection I am beginning to change my mind. Historically there was probably outrage when wax tablets gave way to papyrus, papyrus to parchment, parchment to paper and eventually paper scrolls to books. The recording devices for these media have also undergone an evolution. The quill pen became the dipping pen and later the fountain pen. These have been superseded by ball-point pens. Alongside these came the invention of the mechanical typewriter followed by the electric daisy-wheel machine,
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the stand-alone word-processor and now the computer and multitudes of tablets. The purpose of all of these is the transfer of information, with the added advantage of permanence and asynchronicity—the Dead Sea scrolls being an extreme example of this. Today’s evolving medicine, with the fragmentation of primary care and the concentration within hospitals of complex patients involving several disparate specialties, means safe, rapid and reliable transfer of information is essential. Handwriting is far from ideal for this purpose. Yet even in a new hospital with everything state-of-the-art, including the electronic medical record and every kind of monitoring device, the day-to-day progress notes are still handwritten. This means that they cannot be easily entered into
the electronic medical record (they could be scanned but this is not immediate and labour inefficient); when remotely accessing the hospital record this vital data is not available. Paper-chart entries are labourious and slow to read at best, and illegible and potentially misleading at worst. But their advantage is that the information is immediately available to anybody geographically or temporally close to the writer. Doctors’ handwriting, the butt of many jokes, is not really a joke at all. Handwritten prescriptions are easily misread and interpreting the hastily written script wastes pharmacists’ time. Studies in the US estimate 7,000 deaths a year are attributable to this, and the UK gives the figure of 30,000 a year. With the availability of computer and
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14-03-07 12:49 PM