I’m writing up a report that deals with Carers/Caregivers. I’ve drawn a complete blank when it comes to how to refer (succinctly) to the people that they care for.
Some words I’ve discarded:
Patient (They’re not necessarily ill or receiving treatment…)
Client (Implies a commercial relationship)
Caree (not even a word!)
Surely the English language can’t fail on this!!
I mean we have:
epicaricacy
n. - taking pleasure in others’ misfortune
but not a noun to describe “someone who is being cared for”?
Seems to me the real problem is this crappy made-up word “caregiver”. “Care” is just the wrong word. It’s marketing speak. The medical industry is just one person providing a service to another.
You’re really going to struggle to come up with one common word which encompasses everything from commercial nursing or doctoring services to a Mom feeding her baby to a spouse making a bed. And this same common word is supposed to exclude barbers and plumbers or spouses DIYing? And be recognizable to your entire audience? Good luck with that.
If you’re going to stick with the ugly and awkward (but admittedly largely standard) “caregiver”, then the most neutral and correct term for their target is “carerecipient”. It’s fugly, but it fills the need. Since it’s a brand new neologism you’ll probably do better to spell it “care-recipient”. It’ll lose the hyphen soon enough if it becomes popular.
If this Satan’s spawn of a neologism becomes mainstream in the next few years, Ill take the credit; you get the blame.
Being a bit facetious; but a rather good word to fill this gap, was coined by Hugh Marriott in his book The Selfish Pig’s Guide To Caring: IMO a perceptive work, leavened with rueful dark-ish humour, about how someone thrust – unwillingly at least to some extent – into the position of intensively caring for a severely disabled (in whatever way) relative / spouse / lover / friend, can best cope with the situation. Throughout the book, Marriott refers to the care-recipient, as the “piglet”: an acronym – Person I Give Love & Endless Therapy. On a scale of 0 to 10: I have, “whatever else”, to award the author for this one, at least 9 for ingenuity – maybe 3 or 4 for quality of grammar.
I was going to say that “client” works and then realized that you want a word that includes both the person a being cared for by a professional caregiver and one being cared for by an untrained, unpaid spouse.
There’s not going to be a good one, because the way we use English just doesn’t work that way. Words like “client” and “patient” don’t define relationships where the client/patients pay for services- but they do define relationships where the care provider would normally be paid. Take “patient” - my sick kid is a patient to the doctor. If he’s in the hospital recovering after surgery, he’s a patient to the nurse. I may be providing just as much care right after the discharge as the nurse did right before the discharge, but no one would ever refer to him as my “patient”- even if I were a doctor or nurse myself…
There aren’t any good one-word options - I’ve seen “individual” but it doesn’t sound right and has no advantage over “person”, and I’ve seen “care recipient” and “person receiving care” but those are multiple words.
In England, I think we often use “invalid”. Now, I’m looking at the word written out, I don’t like it. In valid, no, I don’t like it. The NHS use “person looked after” but that’s quite clumsy.
I preferred “caretaker” myself (cf. “give and take”) but that word already has another overriding meaning. I considered “caregetter” but thought it sounded even worse than “carrecipient”. YMMV.
Service User is the preferred nomenclature in my line of work (working with older people) and throughout the social services in the country I live and work in. Admittedly, it’s an extremely broad term but I think it works in describing the relationship in terms of both parties being equal.
I think I’d concur with Eliahna, above, who suggested ‘dependant’.
Considering that ‘patient’ is derived from the Latin, ‘patiens’ (meaning ‘one who suffers’), ‘dependant’ would possibly better-describe the general relationship that people have with a doctor; in that one does not necessarily have to be ‘suffering’ to be considered a doctor’s patient, but merely be on his/her list of ‘dependants’.
