Misspelling of antimicrobials by healthcare professionals

Although electronic health records have widely reduced medication errors, and computerised hospital orders are an undeniable step-up in clarity from illegible handwritten orders,1 -4 they are not a patient safety panacea. Interpreting free text clinical information of any kind is far from straightforward, especially when it comes to antimicrobials. For starters, hundreds of antimicrobials exist,manyhave similar sounding names (looking at you, cephalosporins), and each antimicrobial can be referred to variously by brand name, generic name, or drug class.5 -7 With 80 antimicrobials beginning with “ceph-” or “cef-” and 54 antimicrobials ending in “-mycin,” 7 it’s no wonder that many healthcare workers struggle to spell each one correctly.