After the Associated Press Stylebook made the startling decision in April to shift from “health care” to “healthcare,” it set off a fierce debate not only in the STAT newsroom, where we use a lightly modified version of AP style, but among our readers.
As STAT’s director of editorial operations and a longtime copy editor, I consulted with my colleagues and also asked for readers’ help. The fight over a single space, which has raged for years, might look a little silly from the outside, and maybe it is. But it’s taken on perhaps outsize importance, and many people, including me, have strong feelings on the matter.
After much deliberation, STAT has decided to continue to use “health care” (two words) and remain consistent with how we’ve written it since our founding more than a decade ago.
While usage can sometimes change from two words to one over time (see the stylebook’s move this year to “daycare” and “childcare”), we feel that “health care” is an exception. Writing “health care” as two words puts more of an emphasis on the two distinct concepts. And it signals that there are many types of care (which are also not written as a compound word) — for example, prenatal care, medical care, and cardiac care.
