If what we write does not communicate, then we have failed in our professional and legal responsibilities. Furthermore, we have failed our patient and our employer, thereby putting all at risk. When documenting, it is imperative that we do not put our patients lives at risk because of the methods we use for the task. These methods include the use of abbreviations. The indiscriminate use of abbreviations can be extremely dangerous to the patient and the nurse and a major waste of time.
Abbreviations can be a total mystery to the reader.
If you and two other nurses looked at this order for 90 seconds each, four and a half minutes of patient care time would have been wasted. Plus you probably still would not have the correct answer. Abbreviations are easily confused. Any of these situations could lead to a serious medication error and catastrophic results for the patient. This type of error automatically multiplies the dosage by a factor of ten.