Thoughts About Meanings of Compliance, Adherence, and Concordance.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the meanings of the widely used terms compliance and adherence and the less widely used term concordance and to raise questions about the appropriateness of these terms when used to describe individuals' or groups' health-related behaviors. Discussion focuses on how recognition of how the meanings of these terms has uncovered the failure to honor nursing's emphasis on person/patient-centered care due to power imbalances between healthcare providers and patents and the subsequent lack of patient autonomy. Consideration of these problems with existing terms could facilitate identification of a potentially more appropriate term based on the language of a nursing conceptual model and/or theory.