Sir, we will all no doubt learn many things from our enforced lockdown, one of which is finding out what is really important. Having been practising for over 44 years I find myself getting very frustrated at the amount of unnecessary patient notes we are expected to record.
I suspect record keeping was mentioned in my undergraduate training but fairly briefly. I came across a brown record card from my early days in practice and I cast my eyes on one particular entry: 'UL6 ela'. That was my shorthand way of doing it and it told me at a glance, yes a glance, when that tooth came out and how, if I wanted to refer back at a later date. For younger readers, I was saying that 'the upper left 6 was extracted using local anaesthetic and there were no complications'. The templates I use now contain over 150 words referring to that exact procedure and outcome and takes far more than a glance to see what I actually did if I needed to find out at a later date.
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Williams, P. For the record. Br Dent J 229, 3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41415-020-1852-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41415-020-1852-8