Medical records
Status post (s/p)
Status post — abbreviated s/p in charts — means "following" or "in the state after" a procedure or event: "s/p L4-L5 fusion" marks a patient's history as after that surgery.
You’ll see s/p everywhere in histories and problem lists: “s/p appendectomy 2019,” “s/p MVC March 2023,” “s/p ORIF right ankle.” It’s the chart’s timestamping convention — a compact way of saying this patient’s baseline now includes this event.
Why it matters for legal readers
For record review, s/p notations are chronology anchors. They date-stamp surgeries, accidents, and hospitalizations even when the underlying records are missing from the production — an “s/p lumbar fusion 2021” in a 2024 note tells you a 2021 surgical record exists and hasn’t been produced. In that way, s/p entries are a built-in completeness check on the medical file.
They’re also where prior-condition disputes live. A plaintiff claiming a first-ever back injury whose old charts read “s/p L4-L5 microdiscectomy” has a records problem; conversely, a clean pre-incident history of s/p entries that never mentions the spine is baseline evidence for causation. Because clinicians copy histories forward, one erroneous s/p can propagate through years of charts — worth tracing to its first appearance before treating it as fact.
In the fact record
FactMarshal extracts s/p references as dated events, which means the procedures a chart mentions get placed on the treatment timeline alongside the records that were actually produced — and the mentions with no matching records surface as gaps to chase.