The S.O.A.P. Reporting Break Through
SOAP is another one of those EMS acronyms that has endured through the years. I was taught the SOAP format in my EMT class 20 years ago and I’m still teaching it to my EMT students today.
SOAP reporting has a bunch of things going for it. It’s simple, it’s universal, it easily adapts to a multitude of situations and its feels familiar, because it’s the order your brain naturally recalls a memory of something that happened.
If there is one major limiting factor to SOAP it has nothing to do with its design and everything to do with its use. When you were in EMT school we drilled you on the importance of accurate and complete documentation. We frightened you with ideas about the legality, confidentiality and permanence of your medical reports. We worked hard to impress upon you the importance of your reporting and, like most, you probably took these lessons to heart. All of these scare tactics might have given you the idea that your medical report is a serious and formal necessity. Serious yes. Formal … no, not always. In fact, in the case of verbal hand-off reports and even standard report narratives (to a lesser degree), I’d argue that rigid formality works against you.
If you want your reports to shine, especially your SOAP format reports, you need to drop the rigid, robot-like formality. What I want you to get from this unconventional review of how to use SOAP is this: you can adapt the format. You can mix it up. You can play with it. SOAP is our tool. We can use it or disregard it in the ways that we see fit.
From now on, I want you to think of soap as your way of answering these four questions:
