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Medical abbreviations ‘pose risk’
Posted by dapo on Mar 21, 2008 in Talking point
I saw this page on the BBC Health page. It suggests that the use of abbreviations should be potentially phased out as it has contributed to 5% of errors in an American study, some of which were fatal. An example quoted in the article concerns the dose of insulin given to a patient. The notes had 6IU, which was interpretated as 61 units and not the actual 6 International Units. It does make for some interesting reading.