A close friend who spent twenty years in the Air Force recently gave me grief about the number of acronyms that seem to have taken over my vocabulary.
His point, to be fair, was not that acronyms are bad.
His point was that if you’re going to use one, you ought to know what it means.
This is a reasonable position.
Unfortunately, I work in healthcare.
We didn’t steal the military’s acronyms.
We developed an entirely separate infestation.
I am a CCBD credentialed through ADH, enrolled with DHS as a Medicaid provider after CMS approved the SPA, and I bill through MMIS using my NPI while worrying about HIPAA, BAAs, EFTs, EOBs, CEUs, CPR, CLC, IBCLC, CHW, UHC, BCBS, SMC, and whatever fresh alphabet soup crawled out of my inbox this morning.
Did you follow all of that?
Congratulations. Either you work in healthcare or you may be eligible for college credit.
And that’s before somebody goes into labor.
Birth work has its own dialect.
There are EDD, L&D, VBAC, TOLAC, ROM, PROM, AROM, EFM, EBB, and BRAIN, just for starters.
At some point we’re not communicating anymore.
We’re playing Scrabble without vowels.
The truly disturbing part is that I understand this stuff.
Someone can say something along the lines of, “The CCBD needs her NPI for MMIS after the CMS SPA approval, but check the EOB before asking DHS about the EFT,” and some horrible part of my brain goes:
Yes. Obviously.
Meanwhile, my close friend is staring at me like I’ve begun transmitting encrypted coordinates to NATO.
And sometimes those of us who work in healthcare and birth forget that normal people don’t speak this language.
An acronym slips into a conversation with a family, and suddenly we have to back up and translate what we just said into actual English.
That’s particularly important in birth work.
Families shouldn’t need a decoder ring to understand what is happening during pregnancy, birth, or postpartum care.
Part of a doula’s job is helping turn the alphabet soup back into language people can actually understand and use.
Because understanding matters.
You can’t meaningfully participate in a conversation when everyone else in the room seems to be speaking in abbreviations.
Acronyms are useful when everyone involved understands what they mean.
When they don’t, they’re just another barrier to understanding.
And part of a doula’s job is helping families get past those barriers.
Of course, while discussing this article with my twenty-year Air Force veteran friend, I made what I thought was a perfectly good joke and referred to all of this as my MOS.
That earned an immediate correction.
MOS is an Army term.
The Air Force uses AFSC.
Fine.
I stand corrected.
So the next time my close friend gives me grief about my alphabet soup, I have my answer ready:
“It’s my AFSC.”
AFSC: Air Force Specialty Code.
See?
Sometimes you really do have to explain the acronym.