Will be interesting to see the response to this - re suddenly ultra-picky QA

About to send off this e-mail to my ROM or whatever she's calling herself these days....

Subject:  QA questions, just to be sure I have it straight....

We really, REALLY need to get a ruling from the client on this stuff. In writing.

In the last missive I got from QA, I was told that the only symbol allowed on ***** was the percent sign; thus, if they dictated 2+, I was to type 2 plus.

Aside from the fact that I've been typing plus signs on ***** reports for 4 years and nobody has ever said anything before… can I take it that this also applies to the minus sign, sometimes doubling as the hyphen, as in UA showed 25-50 WBCs? What about the multiplication sign x, as in alert and oriented x3? Or a wound that measures 1 x 2 cm?  Are we supposed to expand that out to “times”?  What about blood pressure 130/70? That’s also a symbol; should it be 130 over 70 from now on? Or normal saline 100 mL/hour? That would need to become mL per hour. Really? And how about an EEG using the international 10/20 electrode placement system? The 10 slash 20 system (as they dictate it)?

These are all mathematical operators, so if one mathematical operator (the plus sign) is considered a symbol, then why might other operators (subtraction, multiplication and division signs) NOT be considered symbols? Do the rules change on alternate Tuesdays, or perhaps with the full moon?

Okay, yanking my tongue out of my cheek now… but really. Inquiring minds need to know, because inquiring minds also do not want to get dinged by a suddenly-overzealous QA for things we’ve been typing the same freaking way for lo these many years and never been questioned for. No symbols? Okay, we’ll take away all those symbols, and see how long it takes for ***** to blow its roof off…………….. I think they’d have said something by now if they didn’t want plus signs. Or the others. They’re not exactly quiet over there about the things they don’t like, and not shy about letting us know.

Not to mention, all of *****’s cardiology inserts have things like #6-French catheter programmed right into them—and again, nobody has said one word about not wanting the # sign there in the 4 years I've been doing that account.

Hey, if they truly don’t want any of those symbols, we’ll go ahead and expand them—but that’s more characters, which means the reports are going to cost more, a minuscule amount per report, true, but it will add up fast. Last year there was a lot of yelling about extra spaces after periods at the ends of paragraphs that they didn’t want to pay for, for crying out loud, and those of us that were teaching the expander classes were asked if we could make some kinds of shortcuts to find and remove all those extra spaces (no, we couldn’t) … but if they want to pay for 2 plus, alert and oriented times 3, blood pressure 130 over 70, normal  saline 100 mL per hour and number 6-French, I guess that’s their decision. Or… do they? What really constitutes a symbol, and what does not?

We need a list of every single thing that could possibly be classified as a symbol, with examples, and a clear “yes” or “no" for each one. And we need it now, and we need it in writing, so some QA person who has obviously never seen the account before can’t ding us for non-dinging offenses.

Can you tell I'm a little tetchy this morning? Maybe I need more coffee……. But being suddenly “corrected” for something I've been doing for 40 years altogether, and for 4 years on the same (mega-picky) account with no prior mention, doesn’t do a whole lot for my mood….