I came to know about this safety measure when I was looking at the call books used for calling them to see patients. None of the calls had legible signatures. I will show some samples of the signatures I found there.
All the signatures had something in common. There was no English alphabet in any of them. There were curves, tails, and lines. But NO ALPHABETS. None of them was able to tell me which signature belonged to whom. Since I had been trying to find out who had noted a particular call but had not attended it, knowing the identity of the person was important. I could not ask the servant who had taken the call, because it had been taken by the patient’s relative, as is the routine these days. All doctors look alike to the patients’ relatives. When no one would own up having signed the call, I realized they signed in this manner so that they would not be caught and be taken to task for not attending the call. Being scientific in my approach, I visited other wards of other specialties, and looked at their call books. Their resident doctors were just like ours. Same sort of signatures were found there too.
When I mentioned this to a colleague, he said, "the resident doctors should be made to write their names below their signatures. Then they can sign whatever way they want."
"It is a good idea. I can enforce it in our department, but then our resident doctors will resent it when resident doctors in other departments don’t have to do it too, and continue to be protected."
"How do they get this idea? Seniors teach juniors?" he asked.
"Perhaps" I said. "Or it is an instinct. Like a newborn suckles without being taught."
"Don’t they realize it is inappropriate and won’t help them in their future ?" he said.
"But it does sometimes" I said, suddenly thinking of one of our professors who left our institute for a greener pasture. "You remember Professor xxxxx, who had been called by our erstwhile Dean in the middle of the night to negotiate with resident doctors who were threatening to go on strike? When they declined to listen to the Dean and other negotiators, they were issued memos. Our Professor was asked to sign memos given to resident doctors of our department. The signatures on the memos were like these resident doctors’ signatures, distinctly different from the usual signature of that Professor. This Professor had been a resident doctor in our institute 29 years ago." My colleague was surprised at that.
The other day, one of our Registrars came to me to get my signature on the dissertation to be sent to the Health University for his postgraduate examination. I looked at his signature, and asked him, "this signature has only one alphabet at its end. The rest of the signature has no alphabets. How come?"
"That alphabet is the last letter of my surname, Sir" he said.
"And the rest of it?" I asked.
"It is just like that" he said. I wondered how he planned to protect himself from the university by making a signature like that, should the dissertation turn out to be not to the liking of the examiners.
