Charting
July 14, 2010
The sad fact is there is a common practice in a hospital that “if it’s not charted, it didn’t happen.”
When things start to go bad for a patient, there is a very compelling habit on the part of medical providers to hide their mistakes by failing to document their errors.
To the unpracticed eye the chart can often tell a different story than what actually happened to the patient and often with devastating gaps between what happened and what was charted.