The prescription forms for use in General Practice used to be white with faint purple lines to provide guidance on where to write. They were then changed to a green and possibly tamper-evident colouring all over.
When the poor usability of these forms was noted and the Department of Health was pressed to improve this they arranged for later issues of the forms to have white areas.
These easily readable areas were not the areas that Pharmacists or patients need to read to reduce errors, but the areas that the PPA clerks in Newcastle need to read to apportion costs to different budgets.
It would be nice to think this did not define the main priorities of the NHS as financial rather than as safe dispensing.
It is easy to read
writing or printing on the white paper,
but hard to read it on the green.
This makes errors in dispensing drugs more likely
and makes it harder for patients to read
and make sure they are getting the right things.
The result of making reading more difficult is to slow down
all those who have to do it.
Note that the green was regarded as unacceptably poorly usable
for the data entry clerks of the (financial) Prescription Pricing Authority.
By Dr Adrian Midgley. July 2002
Scans made with Epson 1650 using xsane and the Epson SANE scanner drivers onto a PC running SuSE Linux 7.2, edited using the gimp to reduce file size and blur some detail.