Just a smidge, or a bridge too far? Slang use in the ICU

Thinking about slang

Slang can add colour, humour, and nuance to professional interactions and may reinforce group cohesion. It may sometimes seem dark or even callous to the external observer, but it can form part of the armour that doctors develop to protect them from continual exposure to human suffering.

However, where one party doesn’t understand its meaning, slang may create a sense of exclusion. From a patient safety perspective, it’s difficult to support the use of terminology that’s never been formally taught or codified when communicating potentially crucial clinical information. This situation would be unimaginable in the airline industry, whose safety culture anaesthesia and intensive care often attempt to emulate. But our colleagues, including those newer to our department, wish on the whole for it to remain, having worked hard to learn this unwritten code.

Creating a dictionary

We collected the slang terms used by others and ourselves in the ICU over six months and collated these terms and expressions (those that can be committed to print) in a mini-dictionary of ICU slang, and some are used in UK medicine more broadly. We were surprised by how often we communicated crucial information using speech that could not …