The politics of names

Anyone here who has worked within, or been treated by the NHS recently (and I imagine that that's most of you in the UK!) might have noticed that we are no-longer supposed to call our patients ... well - patients. They should now be either clients or service users - so what does this mean for our patients? From a nursing point of view it makes me uncomfortable, I've gone into nursing - to nurse, silly as that sounds I know - I haven't gone into nursing to have clients, it makes me feel like a prostitute!
   So what should a patient be called, I've heard some lecturers say that to call a patient a patient makes them  feel like an invalid - and sick. But, surely any patient is! I understand that we need to make our patients/clients/service users feel comfortable and not out of place in hospital - however, in my opinion calling a patient a client is just symptomatic of the changes happening in the NHS at the moment. We're being sold off to the highest bidder - becoming a business with clients - for the better or worse isn't for me to say ... but perhaps you can tell my opinion already!

In other news - what have I been up to? Well I've been enjoying a "user and carer conference" - it was actually far more interesting and valuable than it sounds. We spent the day speaking to a mixture of current patients, former patients and carers about their experiences within the NHS, some of the speakers talked about the old NHS of 30/40 years ago. There was even one man who spoke about the NHS in it's infancy - when he experienced it as a young man with PTSD after the second world war, there was a mixture of responses towards treatment in the NHS, from fantastic to shockingly bad - but everyone of them agreed on what makes a good medical professional, about having the time and conviction to speak to your patients, to treat them like individuals and remember that no matter what the illness, injury or medical problem - they are still a human being, still someone's mam, dad, brother, sister, daughter or son, and it's important to treat them  as human beings.