The message was blunt: Enough of the performer-service user relationship.
The British Medical Association has urged the United Kingdom’s National Health Service to ditch its management-speak and begin using clearer language, for example, “patient” rather than “client” or “service user.”
A motion passed unanimously at the British Medical Association’s Consultants Conference on June 3 called on the National Health Service to use plain English, starting with references to a patient, which in common parlance, describes “the person in the partnership between doctors and those who consult them for health care advice or with an illness.”
There’s been an inexorable move toward management-speak at the National Health Service in recent years, says Dr. Peter Bamber, the West Yorkshire anesthetist who sponsored the motion. “But what really got me going was an internal document which I couldn’t at first understand. It took me several minutes before I realized it was about psychiatric patients and required a response from me. It would have been all too easy just to hit the ‘delete’ button.”
Bamber speculates that referring to patients as “service users” was an attempt to destigmatize illness.
“But if you’re ill, you deserve sympathy and ‘patient’ is a word that generates sympathy,” he says.
Other examples of jargon in National Health Service documents include the term “performer” for doctor, “efficiency savings and disinvestments” for budget cuts, and a request for volunteers to take part in a “proof of concept” project rather than a pilot project. Some National Health Service patients have received letters informing them that their treatment was “embedded within an indication of needs matrix.”
The issue has also drawn the attention of the Plain English Campaign, a UK-based group promoting the use of clear language in public communication, which noted that language confusion among doctors and patients could well become a life or death issue.
While some National Health Service hospitals and trusts have received the Plain English Campaign’s annual Crystal Mark for clarity of language, other health institutions have received its notorious Golden Bull award. Last year, the National Health Service received a Golden Bull for the following definition of the word ‘container’: “In relation to an investigational medicinal product, means the bottle, jar, box, packet or other receptacle which contains or is to contain it, not being a capsule, cachet or other article in which the product is or is to be administered, and where any such receptacle is or is to be contained in another receptacle, includes the former but does not include the latter receptacle.”
Bamber says his medical colleagues don’t object to the medical jargon among doctors. But as with specialized terminology in any profession, such language is often incomprehensible to outsiders, and when addressing a wider audience it is important to use plain English. Bamber adds that while the motion might not end the use of obscure language, “at least now we can say that it is the wish of the medical profession.”
In response, the National Health Service issued a statement that it was “working to improve communication.”