On Sun, 12 Jul 1998 18:06:27 EDT, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>Seriously now I would dispute this. A day or two without your computer is not
>quite the same as never using one at all in your practice to date. I met a GP
>doing this last week, he is still writing all his prescriptions by hand.
>There's more obviously but you know more about it than I do.
The question that needs to be asked is this: is that GP a bad doctor?
Do his patients get an inferior standard of care? If so, why? Is it
because he does not use a computer? Is it because some other
reason(s)?
I have practised medicine for 20 years without computers and 6 with. I
still have my clinical wits about me. I can tell whether a wound is
septic by its smell, I use my eyes, hands and ears to arrive at
decisions. Writing the scripts by hand made open the BNF because I got
used to the 'single clock' prescribing.
As I said before, computers are good at crunching numbers and doing
repititive tasks. That's all. They may be useful for people who do
research and want to analyse large numbers of data.
As we know, 90% of general practice is snot, drivel and puke, so,
for the majority of us, we have beasts on our desktops that can send a
woman to Mars yet we use them to record snot, drivel and puke and get
too excited about it. Hoorah :-)
Ahmad
________________________________________
Dr Ahmad Risk
http://mednetics.org
home: +44 1273 748198
work: +44 1737 240022
fax: +44 1737 244660
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