Reputation and the legibility of doctors' handwriting in situ

The consequences of failed communication can be as disastrous and doctors h ave a reputation for illegibility. Previous research supports this opinion but little work, has been done to assess doctors' legibility in situ. Our s tudy evaluates if doctors deserve their reputation and investigates holt, l egibility is affected by the time taken to write. Sets of in-patient hospit al notes were selected at random. The first written entry by a doctor and a nurse in the current admission were analysed. In addition to this, 10 doct ors and 10 nurses, unaware of the trite nature of the study, wrote out list s of words and the time taken to do the task was recorded. The doctors' han dwriting was significantly less legible (p=0.010) and they wrote significan tly quicker (p=0.005). However a small minority of the doctors was responsi ble for the majority of illegible words written by that group.