Article #8
Medical jargon during pregnancy
and birth: does this affect the birth
experience?
Abstract
Throughout the antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal periods,
women and their partners learn a great deal about pregnancy,
birth and the female body. Midwives encourage women to read
up on different topics to enable the women to make choices
about their own care. Although women are understanding more
about this period in their lives, they often have many questions.
Healthcare professionals are still using medical language when
discussing women’s cases and often are not explaining this to the
women. Communication plays such an important role throughout
this highly emotional time for women: is the use of medical jargon
affecting women’s experience of birth?
Medical jargon during
pregnancy and birth:
does this affect the
birth experience?
Author: Madeleine
Shackleton
Keywords:
Medical jargon,
Communication, Birth
experience, Patient
experience
Keywords: Medical jargon, Communication, Birth experience,
Patient experience
Introduction
Communication is imperative for good quality care and for the
safety of the women and families seen in maternity services
(Marsh, 2019). Throughout pregnancy and birth, women and
their families will meet and communicate with many different
healthcare professionals. Language is central and vital to
good communication. Medical jargon is a term describing the
medical language or abbreviations used by health professionals
(Subramaniam et al., 2017). Although it is recommended that all
healthcare professionals limit the use of medical jargon to aid
understanding, many professionals still discuss women’s cases
using this medical jargon (Mobbs, Williams and Weeks, 2018). This
medical jargon can lead to the women and families having little
or no understanding of their own care or treatment plan and this
can ultimately lead to fear and a lack of trust in the healthcare
professionals and the services they provide. Although there are
many disadvantages in using medical language with women, there
are also benefits. Communication between women and healthcare
professionals needs to be reviewed to ensure the women gain
a true understanding of what can happen in appointments. This
will then provide the women with the relevant facts to make
the most informed choices over their own care (NMC, 2015).
Communication has been at the forefront of many improvement
strategies in healthcare for a number of years, including the NHS’
promotion of ‘6 Cs’ and ‘Better Births’ (NHS England, 2012; NHS
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