Patient Definition
Health is not a product. It is about care, not customers. People who are sick are patients.
Buzz words describing doctors as health service providers and patients as customers or clients or consumers or whatever. Whoa!
Health departments and government-funded organizations can't get beyond the all too palatable “consumer” so you have probably come to the realization why patients suffering from their medical treatment and not their illness get forgotten in the health debate.
A health care consumer and medical negligence victim are two separate and vastly different categories of health user.
When things go wrong with your medical care, you go beyond being a "health care consumer” and become a "health care victim”.
Having “consumer” organizations representing “the consumer voice” falsely gives the impression that the medical negligence victims' interests are being represented. THEY ARE NOT.
How many times do you see in the tail-end of health reports “Consumers represented”? Have you noticed it is never “Patients represented”? They plainly do not want to hear from patients.
So-called health care consumers are catered for but not ones affected by medical negligence.
ASK THE FOLLOWING WHAT THEY DO FOR MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE VICTIMS:
- Australian Consumers' Association
- Consumers' Health Forum
- Health Consumers
- Hepatitis C Council, i.e. for tainted blood victims.
Precisely NOTHING; that is why action groups form. Anytime you see any organization claiming “we represent the voice of the health care consumer”, ASK HOW?