Poll: "Do Not Use List" of abbreviations

I think it is a good thing.

I used to be on a medication errors committee. Most were late or missed medications. Once in awhile an error was memorable.

A nurse poured liquid potassium into a patients eye. She only questioned it when the patient yelled with pain.

The order written was meant to be KCl 15cc in OJ (orange juice)

The nurse read "OU" (both eyes).

I don't think OJ is an approved abbreviation.

I don't believe that the majority of medication errors are due to failure to know proper abbreviations. I believe that some are just plain stupid mistakes; others due to bring rushed; or not knowing the proper abbreviations. I have looked at the lists, frankly I do not believe it will solve the problems with medication errors.

Grannynurse :balloons:

I agree with grannynurse. But then I've been at this for nearly 28 years. These abbreviations have been common usage for decades. Changing them like this will cause more problems than it solves. Once again, JCAHO has to have something new to gripe about just to justify their existences. Next year it will be something else. Not that it makes their jobs any more difficult and IMHO, not much of what they mandate improves patient care. It certainly takes nurses away from the bedside because we have to worry about crossing t's and dotting i's on so darned many pieces of paper (or computer screens.) I'll be so glad to retire, because I didn't really want a paperwork job; I wanted a bedside nursing job.

I'm for it.

Now, if we could just have the docs write their names legible...we'd really be in business.

Hate finding a chart with orders and no one knows who wrote them and no one can decipher the signature or the writing as belonging to what doc.

Good idea! Now, if all the docs are told they have to do computer charting instead of scribbling their orders out, that will really make my day. :)

It's a good idea, it would cut down on errors, but it's like teaching old dogs new tricks to try and get the docs who have been doing that for 30+ years to use the new abbreviations.

I think it helps but it's not all it's cracked up to be. If we insisted on either clear writing or computer entry far more errors would be prevented. When hospitals make regulations regarding these things, they need to use common sense.

My big beef is with the trailing zero/leading zero thing. Our hospital did not make clear that in charting things like ETT sizes and labs, one could use trailing zeros (I looked it up on the JCAHO website). It was just silly to me to not consider the rationale JCAHO was trying to get to; which was to reduce MEDICATION errors, and no harm can come of misreading a K+ of 40 because that's not possible, one would know that it's 4.0. One also would never be confused as to whether that baby was intubated with a 3.0 vs. 30 ETT (maybe they make 30's for horses or elephants, so I might be wrong on this one).

Instead our unit had to do every shift audits to catch the "sins" of the previous shift with prizes for those who documented and/or fixed (had the order rewritten) the error. Tell me how it helps the care of a patient to change the documentation of FiO2 from .35 to 0.35 because we must have leading zeros, when there wasn't room on our flowsheet to chart 3 numbers and a period!

Sorry for the rant, still recovering from JCAHO visit several months ago.

I am a student and we were told not to use these abbr's either...I know a nurse that misread an order that said 13U as 130...I guess she should have recognized the error but luckily someone caught her in time...if units had been written out maybe it would have helped...ive also been told that most hospitals are trying to move away from using cc and using ml...is this becuase cc can look like two zeros when written?