Patient

A patient is any recipient of

This language has been construed as meaning that the role of patients is to passively accept and tolerate the suffering and treatments prescribed by the healthcare providers, without engaging in shared decision-making about their care.^[1]

Outpatients and inpatients

An outpatient (or out-patient) is a patient who attends an

An inpatient (or in-patient), on the other hand, is "admitted" to stay in a hospital overnight or for an indeterminate time, usually, several days or weeks, though in some extreme cases, such as with

Misdiagnosis is the leading cause of medical error in outpatient facilities. When the U.S. Institute of Medicine's groundbreaking 1999 report, To Err Is Human, found up to 98,000 hospital patients die from preventable medical errors in the U.S. each year,^[3] early efforts focused on inpatient safety.^[4] While patient safety efforts have focused on inpatient hospital settings for more than a decade, medical errors are even more likely to happen in a doctor's office or outpatient clinic or center.^{[citation needed]}

Day patient

A day patient (or day-patient) is a patient who is using the full range of services of a hospital or clinic but is not expected to stay the night. The term was originally used by psychiatric hospital services using of this patient type to care for people needing support to make the transition from in-patient to out-patient care. However, the term is now also heavily used for people attending hospitals for day surgery.

Alternative terminology

Because of concerns such as dignity, human rights and political correctness, the term "patient" is not always used to refer to a person receiving health care. Other terms that are sometimes used include health consumer, healthcare consumer, customer or client. However, such terminology may be offensive to those receiving public health care, as it implies a business relationship.

In

The

There are many reasons for why health services should listen more to patients. Patients spend more time in healthcare services than regulators or quality controllers, and can recognize problems such as service delays, poor hygiene, and poor conduct.[12] Patients are particularly good at identifying soft problems, such as attitudes, communication, and 'caring neglect',^[9] that are difficult to capture with institutional monitoring.^[13]

One important way in which patients can be placed at the centre of healthcare is for health services to be more open about patient complaints.^[14] Each year many hundreds of thousands of patients complain about the care they have received, and these complaints contain valuable information for any health services which want to learn about and improve patient experience.^[15]

See also

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Patients.

Look up patient in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Jadad AR, Rizo CA, Enkin MW (June 2003). "I am a good patient, believe it or not". BMJ. 326 (7402): 1293–5.
  PMID 12805157
  .
  a peer-reviewed article published in the British Medical Journal's (BMJ) first issue dedicated to patients in its 160-year history
• Sokol DK (21 February 2004). "How (not) to be a good patient". BMJ. 328 (7437): 471.
  PMC 344286
  .
  review article with views on the meaning of the words "good doctor" vs. "good patient"
• "Time Magazine's Dr. Scott Haig Proves that Patients Need to Be Googlers!" – Mary Shomons response to the Time Magazine article "When the Patient is a Googler"