With every PCR you write, imagine that it will someday be enlarged and projected onto a giant screen for the Judge, Jury, Opposing Counsel, and General Public to see… and pick apart. How is your penmanship? How is your spelling? How well are your thoughts organized? What do these things say about you? How do they affect patient care?

It is not uncommon for people to leave such grammatical considerations back in college or even high school. Sadly, conventional wisdom (for many providers) is that PCRs are a matter of function, not form; jot it down and move on – “If they can read the doctor’s handwriting, they can figure out mine.” For many providers, simply spilling information on the form is enough. They argue that spelling is less important than meaning; organization takes too much time; they abbreviate properly where they can and abbreviate creatively where they cannot, and so on.

That line of thinking could cost a career—or worse. To a layperson on a Jury panel, a PCR that may be fully completed and accurate may still seem unreliable or even incomplete if it is sloppy, rife with misspellings, or disorganized. That’s just the beginning.

In this age of instant access to information and news, with YouTube and Google Alerts, the general public has a better view of the world than ever before. We watched the response to the 911 attacks, we watched as EMS workers rushed to save lives in the Minnesota bridge collapse, we watched as police apprehended Rodney King, we watched while OJ, Robert Blake, and Phil Specter got away with murder and all the while we formed our own opinions of what happened based on the snippets from the news or from what was streaming on the internet. We watched, and we judged.

Likewise, from day to day, crew’s quarters and hospital lounges are abuzz with Monday morning quarterbacking based on what was said and what was written about one call or another – and that’s just for fun.

To opposing counsel in a legal action against you, it’s not fun, it’s business. They will use your documentation to try and call into question your competence as a provider. In essence, your skill, ability, and you will be judged by your documentation. Defendants have lost cases for much less.