Medical Terminologies

By Author: Anthony W Bills
Total Articles: 158
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Medical Terminologies
Introduction
Medical terminology is a language used by the health care practitioners. It’s used to describe various activities and description of care needed for the sick and the medicine or the sickness is suffering from. This is used to describe the human body and the activities, conditions and the science based process manner. The approach of this language is based on various concepts that include the word suffix, prefix and the root. The root of the word is derived from the word’s origin which mostly is the language of the word such as Latin, Greek and other languages and are often describes the body part. A prefix can be added in the front of the word to describe the organ location by modifying the root of the word. The suffix is often added to the end of the word to describe the meaning to the root by adding more understanding which may include the condition and the decease procedure. The elimination abbreviations and the use of medical terms may have some advantage both to medical professionals and to the patients in general. In the research, various issues have been researched on ...
... that include how elimination of abbreviations would reduce errors, how could abbreviations be used, when are abbreviations acceptable and who and why they should be used.
How can elimination of abbreviations reduce errors?
Some abbreviations, symbols and dose designations have for a long time been misinterpreted and have lead to mistakes that have been responsible for the harm of the patients. The greatest aim in eliminating the medical terminologies is to avoid the serious harm and potential consequences that may be lead by the use of the terminologies.
According to the report that was given by the institute of medicine (IOM), there more than 7,000 deaths that are caused by medication errors every year. Errors and mistakes can occur in any part of the medication-system, from the prescription to the administering of drugs in any medical facility like hospitals, home care, nursing homes and out patient clinics. These errors are mostly done by medical practitioners, medical students, medical writers, and pharmaceutical industries and the FDA staff. (Leape, 1995)
The prescribers should completely avoid the use of abbreviations especially the names of the drugs as they can be completely being misunderstood. The prescription errors have resulted to various fatal consequences to the patients. Therefore the elimination of use of abbreviations could result to better understanding and therefore improving the quality of the medication prescription and attendance to the patients reducing the number of deaths caused by this. (F.D.A. 2006)
Should written policies be developed for abbreviation usage?
Written policies should be developed for the abbreviation usage. This should be used to benchmark the abbreviations that are used in medical field. Hospitals are different from each other as well as the pharmaceutical industries. If no policy is brought down to address the issue of using the abbreviations, there is likelihood that each practitioner and hospital will use different abbreviations that cannot be understood by others. This may lead to great and fatal consequences as there would be different understandings that may have the same meaning to another abbreviation.
Having a policy to standardize the use of abbreviation will help all hospitals, health cares, home care and other sort of medical care facilities adapt the requirements of the abbreviation usage. On the other hand, medical practitioners, medical students, medical writers and the pharmaceutical industries adopt a uniform knowledge on the usage of the abbreviations that may have no difference in understanding. (Institute for Safe Medication Practices, 2000)
When are abbreviations acceptable? Who should use them and why
There are no acceptable errors in the medication. The use of abbreviations is acceptable to the qualified practitioners and those who can clearly understand the abbreviations used by other practitioners. Any one in the medical field can use the abbreviations provided can understand them; there is no limitation in the usage of the medical abbreviations.
The use of the medical terminologies and abbreviations helps the practitioners save much time which would be used in other activities. Example of the abbreviation; “Congestive Heart Failure” can just be written as CHF, this may have a confusion of many possible meaning if there is no standardization in the usage of the terms and if there is a differentiation in any other term that could have the same meaning, there should have a notable difference in the abbreviations to help in eliminating any possible error. (Leape, 2002)
According to the information in the online articles, do you think enough steps have been taken to reduce errors? (Institute of Medicine, 2000)
According to the online articles, the steps taken are much below the requirements. There is no standard policy that would govern the usage of the abbreviations, even if there are several campaigns being conducted to address the issue, there are still some fatal incidents happening to the patience that have caused by the use of the abbreviations.
As per the IOM report, if there was enough measures that have been taken to address this problem, the number of deaths that are caused by this could have reduced by a certain percentage. There should be a policy that would govern the use of the abbreviations in order to improve the competency of the practitioners and if any error occurs, there should be a follow up to distinguish who among the concerned parties was wrong, either the writer or the interpreter. If this is done, there is probability that all practitioners would be careful in the usage of the abbreviations.

Reference:
F.D.A. 2006, U.S. food and Drag Administration; U.S. department of Health and Human Services, Retrieved from /www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2006/NEW01390.html on 20th Oct/ 08
Institute for Safe Medication Practices. 2000, Discussion Paper on Adverse Events and Error Reporting in Healthcare, January 24, Retrieved from http://www.ismp.org/Pages/concept.html. on 20th Oct/2008
Institute of Medicine. 2000, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Washington, DC: National Academy Press;
Leape L. 2002, Reducing medical errors in daily pediatric practice. Program and abstracts of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Annual Meeting; October 19-23, 2002; Boston, Massachusetts.
Leape, L. 1995, Relationship between medication errors and adverse drug events. J Gen Intern Med.

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