Patient

The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health care provider.

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.

Even if the patient will not be formally admitted with a note as an outpatient, their attendance is still registered, and the provider will usually give a note explaining the reason for the visit, tests, or procedure/surgery, which should include the names and titles of the participating personnel, the patient's name and date of birth, signature of informed consent, estimated pre-and post-service time for history and exam (before and after), any anesthesia, medications or future treatment plans needed, and estimated time of discharge absent any (further) complications.

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.

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.

In nursing homes and assisted living facilities, the term resident is generally used in lieu of patient.

[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.