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Background: It is generally accepted that doctors have illegible handwriting. The writer usually knows what is written, but other parties often have problems with reading and interpreting. Aim: The aim of the study was to determine whether illegible doctors’ handwriting and other factors that can lead to dispensing errors occur on prescriptions at National District Hospital. Method: In part one the prescriptions of 20 doctors were read by five doctors, nurses and pharmacists to detect who could read it most accurately. In part two, these doctors were asked to write a prescription with an IntelliPen®. Results: From the 300 measurements, 88% of the doctors read the prescriptions correctly, compared with 82% of the nurses and 75% of the pharmacists. A potential fatal error was lorazepam injection 4 mg, which was read as 40 mg (lethal dose) by 20% of healthcare workers (HCWs). With the IntelliPen® only 39% of the prescriptions were readable. Only 65% of prescribers could be identified from their handwriting or the name stamp used. Conclusion: Pharmacists read the prescriptions worst and they are the people who must dispense the prescriptions. Some of the reading mistakes were critical and could be lethal. Many of the prescriptions did not meet the legal requirement for prescriptions. (Full text of the research articles are available online at www.medpharm.tandfonline.com/ojfp) S Afr Fam Pract 2017; DOI: 10.1080/20786190.2016.1254932

This study investigated whether a water-handling hygiene education programme could improve the health-related microbiological quality of container water stored and used in households in a dense urban settlement in the Free State Province. Previous studies in the area indicated that stored container water became contaminated during the process of fetching from communal standpipes and then storing and handling the water at home, which exposed the study population to a potential risk of microbiological infection. A water-hygiene education programme was implemented together with a health-related microbiological water quality assessment programme. Members of selected households participated in a series of domestic water-handling hygiene education training sessions over a period of eight months and the quality of their stored water monitored for improvement in tandem over the same period. The results were compared to those of similar tests done during previous studies in the same area. Turbidity, heterotrophic bacteria numbers and total coliform bacteria were used as indicators of general microbial water quality while E. coli bacteria were used to indicate faecal pollution. While the results generally reflected significant improvements for all the indicators from the previous studies, a potential risk of infection was still indicated for consumers. Based on education programme attendance profile, the study sample was divided into frequent, intermittent and never groups. No significant changes were found in water quality between the three groups, even though the frequent group attended most of the training sessions. This implies that the programme did not have a particular influence on any one group. Container-stored water was still being contaminated in the domestic environment despite the water-handling hygiene education programme. An improved hygiene-education programme appears to be needed to change deep-rooted inherent behaviours such as hand-washing prior to water handling as well as proper protection of container-stored water from environmental contamination.