Pharmacists' use of social media as aiding tools for reading and interpreting illegible prescriptions

The ability to read and interpret a prescription is a crucial and rate-determining step for the provision of correct medicine(s), appropriate instructions to patients and for good practice of pharmacy in general. However, both in public and private healthcare settings, pharmacists continue to receive numerous illegible handwritten prescriptions. This is time consuming, and it poses serious legal and health consequences if prescriptions are read incorrectly, resulting in wrong medicines being dispensed.

This study investigated the impact of using a WhatsApp Group to request assistance to read and interpret illegible prescriptions by pharmacists in South Africa.

Communication records that span between June 2018 and October 2020 were included in this study. Two registered and practising pharmacists, who were not members of WhatsApp Group, verified the correctness of the responses to enquiries.

The WhatsApp Group had 189 participants during the period of this study, and 136 enquiries were made. Only 10 enquiries did not receive responses, while 62, 32 and 32 enquiries received one, two and ≥3 responses, respectively. None of the responses to 29 images, or prescriptions that had received three or more responses, were deemed incorrect. The medians for the period of the first and subsequent responses were two minutes (with interquartile range of 1-4 min) and six minutes (with interquartile range of 3-14 min), respectively; and the difference (i.e., four minutes) was statistically significant (P <0.0001).

The findings of this study suggest that social media platforms such as WhatsApp Groups can be used effectively as tools for aiding in the interpretation of illegible prescriptions.