Question

When do you use patients, patient’s or patients’?

Answer 1

Hint: We need to understand the concept relating to the singular and plural form of the noun along with their possessions. There are different rules related to this.Singular uses with one person whereas plural uses for more than one person.

Complete answer:
Firstly, as per the question we need to understand the meaning of patient. It is a noun used to describe a person who is taking any sort of medical treatment.
Let’s analyse the use of different words related to the patient.

1) Patients
It is a plural form of the noun ‘patient’. The plural form of a noun is used to describe that there are more than one number of a noun present. We can easily change a singular noun in a plural form by adding -s or -es to the noun. Taking into account the above word, to convert patient into plural form we added -s to it. It is showing that there are more than one number of patients; it can be two, three or many more. Example- There are many patients in the ward.

2) Patient’s
It is a singular possessive noun which means that any singular noun or pronoun is having something. In other words, it is used to describe when something belongs to one person. To change a singular noun into a singular possessive noun we add apostrophe and s (‘s) to it. It doesn’t matter whether a singular noun has s or not at the end. Considering the above question, the noun patient converted into patient’s by adding the same. Example- This patient’s report is not fine. Here, it is showing that one particular patient owns his own report.

3) Patients’
It is a plural possessive noun. It is used to describe the ownership of the plural noun or pronoun. When a noun is in the form of plural which means it has -s at its end we change it into possessive by adding apostrophe (‘) to it. With the reference to the question, patients is a plural form of noun and converted into patients’ by adding apostrophe to it. Example- when a short circuit happened, the patient's families were here instantly. Here, it describes the ownership of many patients.

Note: Keep in mind the rules of nouns to change them into another one. There is also an exception to it as Irregular nouns are the one in which we don’t use -s to convert them into plural form. We can change them in plural by changing the spelling of the noun. For example the plural of man is men.