Patients or Clients? Clients or Patients?

This document is one of the few "editorials" that appears in this Knowledge Base.

At various points in this Knowledge Base we discuss the characteristics of the individuals served at the different programs.

Traditionally medical programs use the term PATIENTS to refer to the individuals they serve. Traditionally psychosocial service programs use the term CLIENTS to refer to the individuals they serve. Both kinds of projects are represented among the 27 innovative HIV/AIDS treatment models assessed in this cross-cutting evaluation.

Are the individuals served PATIENTS or CLIENTS?

At the following projects, the individuals served are considered to be PATIENTS. Those individuals all receive medical care as their primary service, and the medical care is provided by that agency as a core element of the program.

• AIDS Healthcare Foundation

• East Boston Neighborhood Health Center

• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

• SUNY–Health Science Center at Brooklyn

• University of Nevada School of Medicine

• University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

• University of Vermont & State Agricultural College

• Visiting Nurse Association Foundation

• Washington University

At the following projects, the individuals served are considered to be CLIENTS. Those individuals all receive psychosocial support services designed to help them cope with HIV/AIDS related programs and to remain in medical care. Each of these providers also either actively helps their clients become linked to off-site medical services, or has part-time on-site medical staff to provide some of the services. For each of these agencies, however, the provision of medical services is not the primary mission of the agency.

• Center for Community Health, Education, and Research (CCHER)

• Fortune Society

• Indiana Community AIDS Action Network

• Larkin Street Services

• Michigan Protection and Advocacy Service

• Outreach, Inc.

• PROTOTYPES

• Well-Being Institute

CLIENTS or PATIENTS? When the groups of individuals are aggregated in this Knowledge Base, we are terming them as PATIENTS. Even though the community agencies providing psychosocial services do not consider their clients primarily to be their patients, they do link these individuals actively to medical services so that they will be patients, and they attempt to support the medical treatment by helping the individual with a wide-range of issues. At some times in this Knowledge Base we will call the individuals served clients when most individuals served received their services from a psychosocial service provider. However, when the projects are "mixed" together, we are terming the individuals served as PATIENTS. This is not done as a lack of respect to the community psychosocial service providers (and in fact, the authors of the this Knowledge Base are psychologists and not medical providers). Rather our use of the term PATIENTS refers to the fact that the individuals served are receiving these innovative HIV/AIDS services so that they can remain healthy, primarily through regularly accessing medical treatment and needed psychosocial supports for the medical treatment.

Clients or Patients? PATIENTS.

G. J. Huba, Ph.D.

P.S. I would appreciate not receiving any email about this!

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Copyright © 2005 by The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved. This may not be current and will not be updated.