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Medical Terminology · Chapter 5

The Wound Note Reader

Charting the skin demands three things at once: correct plurals, institution-approved abbreviations and current terminology. Run fifteen terms through the Greek and Latin plural rules on the left, then open a real wound-care note on the right and expand every abbreviation in it. Two of them should never have been written at all — find them, and the plain-English version of the note assembles itself as you go.

1 · Singular and plural

Give the plural of
bulla
↓
Correct 0 of 15Streak 0

2 · The rules behind it

Two that catch people out. Petechiae is already plural — a chart entry reading several petechia is a grammatical error a careful reader will notice. And pruritus is not an -itis: it is a Latin noun for itching, spelled p-r-u-r-i-t-u-s, and its adjective is pruritic. It is not an inflammation of anything.

3 · The note as it was written

Wound care progress note
Click every abbreviation. Two of them are on the error-prone list and should never appear in a chart — those will turn red.
Start clickingEach abbreviation you open is explained here, and the plain-English note below fills itself in as you go.
Expanded 0 of 19Unsafe found 0 of 2

4 · The same note in plain English

Decoded
Current terminology matters too. The National Pressure Injury Advisory Panel replaced pressure ulcer with pressure injury, because the earliest stage involves no ulceration at all, and added deep tissue pressure injury and unstageable — the latter meaning the wound base is obscured by slough or eschar so depth cannot be determined. Staging runs 1 through 4 in Arabic numerals.