Whether you’re a nursing student reviewing a patient’s chart, studying a lecture, or a nurse who has worked in the same unit for years, you will come across medical abbreviations that you have never seen before. No worries its time to decipher the mystery information placed there by a physician, nurse, or other member of the health care team.
#1 Have you seen this before?
The grouping of letters, you come across them previously in another patient’s chart? Are you staring or wondering thinking you have seen this before? If you have seen it before try to figure it out, even if its only one word out of the line of letters. Thinking it over with one identified letter will jog your memory.
#2 Ask your neighbor
So you either have seen it before and can’t at all remember at all or never have seen it. Ask the nurse or student sitting or working next to you. Even if you only remember a fragment of the abbreviation the person next to you maybe able to fill in the blanks.
#3 Search that!
When in doubt ask Google. A quick internet look up will find your answer. Unfortunately, you may find several other answer as well. To narrow the search it helps to add in the search field the medical area. Typically, if you don’t know a particular acronym, see which doctor made note of it, the Cardiologist, or the Gastroenterology. If its not the doctor which system is it under in the notes. The same letters could be very different, ROM for a maternity nurse would mean rupture of membranes, although in orthopedics or rehab stands for range of motion.
Knowing every single acronyms isn’t important, there will be one that you see every shift and knew off the top of your head. But being able to find the information is the most important skill.