Warnings against doctors: Improve your handwriting!
View(s):Have you ever encountered a problem in reading a medical prescription where the doctor’s handwriting is illegible? Well this cumbersome practice might be over! Last Sunday, the Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC) drew attention to ‘prescription writing and rational prescribing rules’ contained in the guidelines on ethical conduct for medical practitioners and warned that doctors and dentists are liable to violation of professional misconduct and open to disciplinary action under the Medical Disciplinary (Procedure) Regulations 1990.
In a newspaper notice dated November 9, the SLMC said these illegible prescriptions have caused “much confusion to patients and pharmacists and have given rise to difficulty in obtaining correct prescribed medications, thereby compromising patient safety”.
Coincidentally this warning comes on the back of a Kussi Amma Sera (KAS) column piece dated October 12, 2025 in the Sunday Times Business titled “Physician heal thyself” where attention was drawn to the eternal problem of being unable to read the scrawled writing of a doctor on a prescription which left patients wondering whether they were getting the right medicine from the pharmacist. The column referred to a case in India where a court asked the government to include handwriting lessons in the medical school curriculum and set a two-year timeline for rolling out digitised prescriptions. Until that happens, all Indian doctors must write prescriptions clearly in capital letters, it was stated. KAS said that before someone follows the Indian example and files a fundamental rights case in a local court saying the rights of patients are violated owing to unreadable prescriptions, the SLMC should run crash courses on writing clear prescriptions. The SLMC newspaper notice said that they had received several complaints from the public including pharmacists about illegible prescriptions by some doctors.
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