What’s With Physiotherapist Abbreviations?
If you ask most physiotherapists, no matter if they work publically, privately, in home care or in the community, they will tell you that the part they love most about their jobs is the patient interaction. But, if you ask them the worst part of their jobs, for most it’ll be the paperwork. With busy caseloads and limited time and desire to spend on charting, many physiotherapists have adopted common acronyms in their documentation. While this may increase efficiency, if you\’re reviewing a patient\’s chart and are not familiar with theses acronyms, this seemingly simple task can become much more difficult.
Currently, employer dictated standardized lists of appropriate acronyms are far and few in between. There are no practical resources for physiotherapy specific acronyms and google searches provide endless lists of medical acronyms where many of them can be misinterpreted as representing several different terms.
Here\’s the Solution!
To limit the confusion, ignitephysio has created a list of what we would consider to be the top 40 common physiotherapy acronyms in Canadian practice. Organized into general, anatomy, hospital and condition specific categories, this resource will allow you to quickly identify unfamiliar acronyms on the fly and create a common language through which physiotherapists can communicate amongst themselves. Print it off, post it in your work space and get to work deciphering!
