ArticleAnnals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England2023
A cross-sectional retrospective study comparing handwritten operation notes with electronic operation notes.
Article in Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Real-world validation of a multimodal LLM-powered pipeline for high-accuracy clinical trial patient matching.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Re: A cross-sectional retrospective study comparing handwritten operation notes with electronic operation notes.Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England · 2025Article
- Improving Adherence to National Laparoscopic Appendicectomy Documentation Guidelines: A Quality Improvement Project.Cureus · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionElectronically completed medical notes have been shown to be superior in legibility and completeness to handwritten ones. Despite this, surgeons continue to use handwritten operation notes. This paper aims to compare the quality of handwritten versus electronic operation notes.
methodsThis is a retrospective cross-sectional single-centre study done at Darent Valley Hospital, a district general hospital at Dartford, UK. We looked at 405 operation notes of patients who had general surgery procedures between 1 January 2020 to 31 January 2021 checking for legibility and completeness of operation note criteria as given by the Royal College of Surgeons of England's
resultsIn 17 out of the 18 criteria in RCS England's
conclusionsElectronic notes are far better completed than handwritten notes in 17 out of the 18 criteria of a good operation note by RCS England. The difference between both forms of notes is far too much; we propose a complete shift in practice from handwritten to electronic format.
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Registered trials
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