SINGAPORE: As a junior medical officer, one of my primary duties was to scribe for mature doctors when they interviewed patients. In endeavoring to keep up with their pace, we would often truncate long words. This particular included diagnoses. For example , instead of writing cerebrovascular accident, we would make use of acronyms such as CVA.
Furthermore in my first psychiatric posting, other trainees and I would usually replace schizophrenia with “Schiz” whenever writing notes. Eventually, using such abbreviations became habitual, resulting in us using these terms when we communicated the diagnosis verbally.
It was not long before this caught the attention and, unsurprisingly, incurred the ire of our senior psychiatrists in the hospital.
In this foregone era exactly where medical audits are not the be-all plus end-all, our seniors were upset around for using brief forms such as “Schiz”, either written or even verbal, not simply because they were afraid that people would fail an audit, but due to the fact doing so was disrespectful.
We learnt that as mental health providers, we should respect the illnesses we treat plus, even more so , the patients who are labouring under the immense debilitation of these unfortunate health problems.
Some shrugged off such terminology issues as unimportant and instead held responsible the senior doctors for being “anal”.
I, however , took to the reasoning and also have since joined the ranks of greying psychiatrists. Having been conditioned to utilise psychiatric diagnoses in the strictest and most accurate way, it is often extremely jarring to hear them used flippantly by the community.