We had an email from a user asking if the search “do not resuscitate” (as a phrase) was possible. I was curious as – surely – it works. Unfortunately I was wrong. The issue being the use of a Boolean term within a phrase – in this case ‘not’. Via the advanced search I used this search:

And the system interpreted the result as:

Odd and, even though it’s a fringe example, it needed exploring. Well, we’ve fixed it – mostly! If you now do the search the results look like this:

But why do I say it’s fixed ‘mostly’? Well, another quirk of the system kicks in – in this case synonyms. In our system we have the following terms as synonyms:

  • DNR
  • DNAR
  • do not attempt resuscitation
  • do not resuscitate

So, when you do the search for “do not resuscitate” it also searches for the other synonyms as well, so you get results like this:

So, some “do not attempt resuscitation” in there. These are not the exact phrase the user searched for but there is no way to get round this unless we remove the synonyms in our system. It seems to me to be the lesser of two evils to allow these synonyms in the search. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong 🙂