‘Clear handwriting a fundamental right': Indian court asks doctors to end illegible prescriptions

The court also recommends including handwriting lessons in the Indian medical school curriculum, BBC reports

FILE - A woman checks her mobile phone inside the premises of the Supreme Court in New Delhi, India, Sept 28, 2018. On September 29, 2022, India's top court for the first time made women central decision makers on abortion rights, while also acknowledging marital rape — currently not punishable under Indian law. REUTERS

A high court in India has said legible medical prescriptions are a "fundamental right" for patients, underscoring the potential for misinterpretation to become a matter of life and death.

The ruling came from the Punjab and Haryana High Court during a bail hearing in a case unrelated to the written word.

According to the BBC, Justice Jasgurpreet Singh Puri was reviewing a medico-legal report concerning a case of alleged rape, cheating and forgery, but found the government doctor's report and a corresponding two-page prescription to be completely incomprehensible.

Justice Puri wrote in his order that "not even a word or a letter was legible”, adding that it was "shocking that government doctors are still writing prescriptions by hand which cannot be read by anybody except perhaps some chemists" when technology is readily available.

The court has now set a two-year deadline for the government to implement a complete digitisation of prescriptions and mandated that, until then, all doctors must write clearly in capital letters.

Furthermore, the court recommended including handwriting lessons in the medical school curriculum.

This is not the first time Indian courts have intervened; previous rulings from the Odisha and Allahabad High Courts have also flagged the "zigzag style" and "shabby handwriting" of doctors, the BBC said.

In one case, a woman suffered convulsions after a pharmacist mistakenly dispensed a diabetes drug due to its similar-sounding name to the prescribed painkiller.

The issue was previously highlighted by a pharmacist, Chilukuri Paramathama of Telangana, who filed a public interest petition in 2014 after the reported death of a three-year-old child in Noida due to a wrong injection.

This led to a 2016 order by the Medical Council of India demanding prescriptions be written with generic names and legibly in capital letters.

However, nearly a decade later, pharmacists confirm that illegible scripts still arrive daily, particularly in suburban and rural areas, despite a shift to digital prescriptions in major cities.

Dr Dilip Bhanushali, president of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), acknowledged the widespread issue of poor handwriting, attributing it to the intense pressure and high volume of patients, especially in overcrowded government hospitals.

He added that the IMA is willing to help but noted that a doctor seeing "70 patients a day, you can't do it”.

Internationally, the risks are also known.

A 1999 US report estimated that 7,000 preventable deaths annually were attributable to sloppy handwriting.

More recently in the UK, a woman suffered chemical injuries after being mistakenly given erectile dysfunction cream for a dry eye condition, prompting health authorities to acknowledge that electronic prescribing systems could reduce drug errors by 50 percent.

While India lacks robust national data on the harm caused by poor handwriting, experts insist the issue is not about aesthetics but about patient safety, as any ambiguity can have tragic consequences.