Related to More formal word for "know-it-all"
I need an alternative for the word clinical in the following context. This is a quote from my special education impartial hearing transcript. The child's therapist, a PhD in psychology, is the person testifying. (I'm the one who asked the question.) She's describing anomalies she observed in a school meeting she attended. Normally these meetings involve the child's teachers and parents talking collaboratively about how to resolve certain academic and behavior problems that come up in school for the child, who has a disability.
Q: What sort of role were you seeing the district's lawyer play?
A: A very active role. I think if someone just looked at the meeting, it would appear to have been run by the attorney and the deputy superintendent. Both the administrator and the attorney engaged in a great deal of back-and-forth often about clinical issues.
I need another way of expressing this idea of clinical issues, to use in the analysis section of my written Closing Argument.
Here's a standard definition of clinical, which doesn't seem to fit (Collins Dictionary of Medicine):
- Concerned with the immediate observation, examination and treatment of patients.
- Relating to a CLINIC.
These look more promising (Saunders Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary):
clinical policies: professional rules of thumb which are used to decide on the management of a case when there are no research results on which to base decisions. They are policies originated by the senior members of the profession, especially those in academic posts.
clinical judgment: exerted while the patient is still alive; the critical decisions made on the basis of scientific observations but with the added skill provided by long experience of similar cases. To this must be added an innate ability to make balanced judgments based not only on the state of the animal and its predictable future but also on some consideration for the patient's overall well-being and the client's financial status and degree of psychological, or in some cases actual, dependence on the patient.
I feel like I understand what the psychologist was saying in her testimony; she's used to using clinical in this way, in her profession. But I would be more comfortable using a different word when I'm writing in my own voice.
The closest I've gotten is
issues of educational management of the child's disabilities
And my point is going to be that the lawyer is not qualified to participate actively in those discussions, and that it's not appropriate for her to get involved in educational management decisions to that extent.
Is there something closer to clinical than my proposed educational management?
