A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health care provider. Etymology
The word patient originally meant one who suffers. This English noun comes from the Latin word patienscode: lat promoted to code: la , the present participle of the deponent verb, patiorcode: lat promoted to code: la , meaning I am suffering, and akin to the Greek verb πάσχεινcode: ell promoted to code: el  (paskhein, to suffer) and its cognate noun πάθοςcode: ell promoted to code: el  (pathos). This language has been construed as meaning that the role of patients is to passively accept and tolerate the suffering and treatments prescribed by the healthcare providers, without engaging in shared decision-making about their care. Outpatients and inpatients
An outpatient (or out-patient) is a patient who attends an outpatient clinic with no plan to stay beyond the duration of the visit.
The admission to the hospital involves the production of an admission note. The leaving of the hospital is officially termed discharge, and involves a corresponding discharge note, and sometimes an assessment process to consider ongoing needs. In the English National Health Service this may take the form of "Discharge to Assess" - where the assessment takes place after the patient has gone home.Misdiagnosis is the leading cause of medical error in outpatient facilities. When the U.S. Institute of Medicine’s groundbreaking 1999 report, To Err Is Human, found up to 98,000 hospital patients die from preventable medical errors in the U.S. each year, early efforts focused on inpatient safety. While patient safety efforts have focused on inpatient hospital settings for more than a decade, medical errors are even more likely to happen in a doctor’s office or outpatient clinic or center. Day patient
A day patient or (day-patient) is a patient who is using the full range of services of a hospital or clinic but is not expected to stay the night. The term was originally used by psychiatric hospital services using of this patient type to care for people needing support to make the transition from in-patient to out-patient care. However, the term is now also heavily used for people attending hospitals for day surgery. Alternative terminology
Because of concerns such as dignity, human rights and political correctness, the term "patient" is not always used to refer to a person receiving health care. Other terms that are sometimes used include health consumer, healthcare consumer, customer or client.