This is a list of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions, including hospital orders (the patient-directed part of which is referred to as sig codes). This list does not include abbreviations for pharmaceuticals or drug name suffixes such as CD, CR, ER, XT (See ' for those).
Capitalisation and the use of
full stop
The full stop ( Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation).
A ...
s are a matter of
style. In the list, abbreviations in English are capitalized whereas those in Latin are not.
These abbreviations can be verified in
reference work
A reference work is a document, such as a Academic publishing#Scholarly paper, paper, book or periodical literature, periodical (or their electronic publishing, electronic equivalents), to which one can refer for information. The information ...
s, both recent
and older.
Some of those works (such as Wyeth 1901
) are so comprehensive that their entire content cannot be reproduced here. This list includes all that are frequently encountered in today's
health care
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...
in
English-speaking regions.
Some of these are obsolete; others remain current.
There is a risk of serious consequences when abbreviations are misread or misinterpreted. In the United Kingdom, all prescriptions should be in English without abbreviation (apart from some units such as mg and mL; micrograms and nanograms should ''not'' be abbreviated).
In the United States, abbreviations which are
deprecated by the
Joint Commission are marked in red; those abbreviations which are deprecated by other organizations, such as the
Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) and the
American Medical Association (AMA), are marked in orange.
The Joint Commission is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization which offers
accreditation to hospitals and other health care organizations in the United States. While their recommendations are not binding on U.S. physicians, they are required of organizations who wish accreditation by the Joint Commission.
__TOC__
Table
Currently discouraged practices
* Abbreviating names of
drugs
* Using
apothecary's units
* Using
trailing zeros or not using a
leading zero
See also
*
List of medical abbreviations
References
External links
*
{{MedAbbrev
Prescriptions