Sussex Health and Care NHS trust has issued a 26-page language guide instructing staff to drop widely used medical terms in favour of alternatives deemed less likely to cause offence or anxiety. The word "patients" is to be replaced with "experts by experience", "customers" or "consumers", while "normal" should give way to "non-disabled person", and "discharged" becomes "warm handover". Critics, including the Free Speech Union, have condemned the changes as an example of NHS bureaucracy pandering to "woke" language trends, warning that staff, particularly older employees, risk being investigated for using terms that have been standard medical practice for decades.

The guidance, the product of a two-year, taxpayer-funded review involving workshops and focus groups, also tells clinicians to avoid "assessment" and "able-bodied", and asks staff to challenge colleagues who use terms considered inappropriate. It further recommends "autistic people" over "people with autism", and "under-represented" or "under-served" instead of "hard to reach" for patients who miss appointments. The trust says the aim is to prevent language from feeling alienating or triggering, but Free Speech Union leader Lord Young argued the shift goes too far, questioning why even the word "patient" is being discouraged. The row follows similar controversies at other NHS trusts, including a ban on idioms like "the early bird catches the worm" at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals and a 2024 menopause policy criticised for stating that "not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman".