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PRIMARY CARE:
Martin N Marshall, Julia Hiscock, and Bonnie Sibbald
Attitudes to the public release of comparative information on the quality of general practice care: qualitative study
BMJ 2002; 325: 1278 [Abstract] [Full text]
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[Read Rapid Response] Obscure jargon
Irvine Loudon   (4 December 2002)

Obscure jargon 4 December 2002
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Irvine Loudon,
Medical historian, previously general practitioner
The Mill House, Wantage, Oxon OX12 9EH

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Re: Obscure jargon

This paper on quality of care in general practice begins as follows:

Objectives: To examine the attitudes of service users, general practitioners, and clinical governance leads based in primary care trusts to the public dissemination of comparative reports on quality of care in general practice, to guide the policy and practice of public disclosure of information in primary care.

I read this about six times and failed to understand it. What are service users? Patients? The public? or just people? Is the word ‘leads’ in ‘clinical governance leads in primary care trusts’ used as a noun (as in ‘put that dog on its lead’) or a verb (as in ‘lead kindly light’)?

Eventually I decided that what the authors were trying to say is something like this:

Objectives: Standards of care in general practice vary widely. If the variation can be measured, should the results of such measurements be available to the public? We put this question to general practitioners, primary care trusts and a small group of people selected from the public.

Incidentally what is the difference between a group (of people) and a focus-group?

I turned to the opening sentences of other articles published in this number of the BMJ. All were easy to understand at first reading, even those on quite recondite subjects, because they were written in plain English.

The opening sentence of this paper, however, is so obscure, ugly, and ridden with jargon that most readers will try and fail to understand it and turn to something else, thereby defeating the aim of the authors to make their ‘qualitative study’ known. Perhaps what worries me most is that the editorial staff of the BMJ allowed that opening sentence to be published.

Irvine Loudon

Competing interests:   None declared