As we in the United States ponder about the future of healthcare, the industry itself has another underlying issue–namely how to properly use the word.
Since I am an aspiring healthcare public relations professional, I find this topic of particular interest as I put my resume together. The little space between the two words or lack thereof could cause my resume to get tossed depending on who’s reading it due to the lack of consensus on the proper usage. I thought a way to tackle the issue was to blog about it.
Before blogging about it, I googled it. Wikipedia lists it under “health care,” but notes that it is often called healthcare in “American English.”
The Boston Globe has a “Healthcare” sub-section under business, while the New York Times uses two words in most articles.
Many organizations do not use the word in a consistent manner, and one can find it written one way in some places and differently elsewhere. The American Medical Association’s web site yields search results for both terms.
The AP Stylebook says, briefly, “two words.” Normally I would go with what the AP Stylebook suggests, but this case is interesting based on my audience.
After looking at a variety of public relations firms, which have healthcare divisions, I found that a vast majority of them use one word–maybe one out of the fifteen that I checked go with two words. PRWeek.com lists “Healthcare” under the sectors section of the page, which makes me feel more comfortable with this usage in the public relations world.
In this case, as I learned in journalism school, it’s important to be consistent with your organization. I’ve decided as a rule of thumb to match my usage to the organization to which I am submitting a job application.
I also tried to think about it according to grammar rules. In many cases I’ve seen the two words used when describing the provision of health care, which is when the term is used as a noun. However, when it is an adjective, it’s often written as one word, such as healthcare public relations professional. This makes sense to me, but as an industry we need some sort of consensus–at least to rest the minds of young job-seekers like myself.
Another part of this issue is search engine optimization. If you are creating online content and you want more people to be able to find it on search engines, do people search for “healthcare” or “health care” more often? And are the two spellings used by different demographics (which might affect which spelling you use for your publication depending on who you target).
As part of this, one downside for being consistent is that you will get traffic for searches like “healthcare debate” but you will miss out on traffic for phrases like “health care debate” because generally the search engines see these as different search terms.
There is no good answer, but a marketing person would look at the data on search volume as part of how to make this decision, and might also argue for some inconsistency in spelling in order to attract more website visitors.
Mike–
Thanks for your great point. This is a pragmatic approach to the issue. I appreciate your commentary.
Alessandra