Misspelling of antimicrobials by healthcare professionals

Although electronic health records have widely reduced medication errors, and computerised hospital orders are an undeniable step-up in clarity from illegible handwritten orders,1234 they are not a patient safety panacea. Interpreting free text clinical information of any kind is far from straightforward, especially when it comes to antimicrobials. For starters, hundreds of antimicrobials exist, many have similar sounding names (looking at you, cephalosporins), and each antimicrobial can be referred to variously by brand name, generic name, or drug class.567 With 80 antimicrobials beginning with “ceph-” or “cef-” and 54 antimicrobials ending in “-mycin,” 7 it’s no wonder that many healthcare workers struggle to spell each one correctly.When healthcare teams submit patient samples for microscopy and culture, microbiology laboratories use clinical information included in the request to inform specimen preparation and analysis as well as result interpretation.89 Misspelling the names of common antimicrobials could, on occasion, create confusion for those interpreting…
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