It comes down to which healthcare professionals or agencies understand the importance of SI symbolism. If we presume to use a true standard of measurement in healthcare, then everyone involved must use the same symbols. Sadly, they don't do it uniformly. There are even more egregious violations of that symbolism in pharmacy software. Pharmacists who care about this would be grateful, right now, to see ANY letter "g" for gram, much less the correct, lower case "g." But much current pharmacy software uses the same erroneous "GM." that much of healthcare uses. Retail pharmacies usually do not employ lower case on their prescription labels, so "MG" takes the place of the correct symbol for the milligram on most prescription labels.
Last year, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) began prohibiting ambiguous abbreviations in medical records, but it has yet to extend this enforcement to correct SI unit symbols. An unfortunate, but practical, exception to SI symbol use in healthcare is JCAHO's prohibition of the Greek letter "mu" for the SI prefix "micro." When handwritten, "mu" is is easily confused with a lower case "m," and, I must say, is not a familiar symbol to quite a few healthcare workers anyway. Better metric education, coupled with a transition to 100% electronic records, should one day solve that problem. I shall continue to urge the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) to push for the correct use of SI in healthcare. Paul T. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Elwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: 05 Dec 10,Saturday 13:47 Subject: [USMA:35372] blood tests > I had my annual physical last Monday, and received the blood test lab > printouts yesterday. It won't surprise anyone that they are all in > metric: g/dL, mg/dL, etc. > > Unfortunately, the entire document is printed in upper-case text. So > the symbols really show up as: > > MG/DL > MMOL/L > G/DL > > The other problem is they list microliter as MCL. > > I don't know if this is standard in the medical industry or just this > particular testing lab. It is unfortunate, in any case. > > The company that did the testing is Quest Diagnostics. They say on > thier web site: "Quest Diagnostics is America's leading provider of > diagnostic testing services, performing laboratory tests for more > than 500,000 patients each day." > > Jim > > > > > Jim Elwell, CAMS > Electrical Engineer > Industrial manufacturing manager > Salt Lake City, Utah, USA > www.qsicorp.com > >
