Commonly Used Terms Flashcards
What does ADL stand for?
Activities of Daily Living
What are activities of daily living (ADL)?
A term used in healthcare to refer to daily self-care activities
Used routinely as a measurement of the functional status of a person, particularly in regards to people with disabilities and the elderly
What is birth rate?
Summary rate based on the number of live birsths in a population over a given period of time, usually one year
What is a clinical audit?
A quality improvement process that seeks to improve patient care and outcomes through systemic review of care against explicit criteria and the implementation of change
What is clinical effectiveness?
The degree to which the organisation is ensuring the ‘best practice’ based on evidence of effectiveness where such evidence exists, is used
What is coping?
The process of managing stress
What is critical appraisal?
Process of carefully and systematically examining research to judge its trustworthiness and its value and relevance in a particular context
What is culture?
Complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs etc
Systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and ruiles and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that human beings live
What is diseaese?
Physiological or psychological dysfunction
As distinct from an ‘illness’, a disease is essentially the same biological process in each individual who suffers it, whereas an illness will be influenced by other features such as age, personality, personal circumstances and previous experience
What is disease prevention?
Measures taken to prevent diseases rather than curing them or treating their symptoms
What is ethnicity?
Refers to cultural practices and outlooks that character and distinguish a certain group of people
Characteristics identifying an ethnic group may include a common language, common customs and beliefs and tradition
This term is preferred over ‘race’
What is gender?
Social implications of being male or female, including differences in the way women and men thing, behave or interact in society
Gender patterns vary both within and between societies
What is a hazard?
The potential to cause harm
What is health promotion?
Process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health
Applied to a wide range of approached to improving health of people, communities and populations
What is illness?
A person’s experience or subjective notion of being ill
This is not to be confused with ‘disease’
What is incidence?
The number of new cases of a disease in a population in a defined period of time
Incidence tells us something about trends in causation and the aetiology of disease
What is infant mortality rate?
A measure of the rate of deaths (usually in one year) in children less than one year old with the number of live births in the same year as the denominator
This is a often cited as a useful indicator of the level of health in a community
What are the two mortality rates?
All-case mortality
Disease-specific mortality
What is all cause mortality?
Measure of the number of deaths (from any cause) in a particular population, scaled to the size that population usually expressed per 1000 or 100,000 persons per year
What is all-cause mortality sometimes refered to as?
Crude death rate
What is disease-specific mortality?
Number of deaths due to a given disease per time, usually expressed per 1000 or 100,000 persons per year
What is prevalence?
Number (proportion) or individuals with a disease at a given point in time (point prevalence) or within a defined interval (period prevalece)
What are the 2 kinds of prevalence?
Point prevalence
Period prevalence
What is point prevalence?
Number of people with a disease at a given point in time
What is period prevalence?
Number of people with a disease within a defined interval
What is quality of life?
General well-being of individuals and societies
Health related quality of life (HRQoF) is a multi-dimensional concept that includes domains relating to physical, mental, emotional and social functioning, and focuses on the impact health status has on quality of life
What does HRQoL stanf for?
Health related quality of life
What is QUALY?
Measure of disease burden, including both the quality and the quantity of life lived
Used in assessing the value for money of an intervention
The QALY is based on a number of years of life that would be added by intervention
What is race?
Group of people linked by biological or genetic factors
This term should not be used to describe different social groups, that is ethnicity
What is risk?
Measure of the liklihood of harm occuring
What is self-efficacy?
A person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in, or manage, a particular situation
What is sex?
The biological characteristics of men and women
What is social class?
Form of social stratification (layering of society)
The most common occupational classification currently in use (and has been since 1911) has 6 classes:
1 (professionals)
II (managerial and technical)
IIIa (skills-non manual)
IIIb (skills-manual)
IV (partly skilled manual)
V (unskilled)
What is stress?
The body’s response to the demands placed upon it
What is the sick role?
Traditionally temporary, medically sanctioned social role of being sick
