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Below is a excerpt from this website (emphasis mine).

6.2.1.1 Privacy Consent Directive (PCD)

Privacy policies define how Individually Identifiable Health Information (IIHI) is to be collected, accessed, used and disclosed. A Privacy Consent Directive as a legal record of a patient's (e.g. a healthcare consumer) agreement with a party responsible for enforcing the patient's choices, which permits or denies identified actors or roles to perform actions affecting the patient within a given context for specific purposes and periods of time. All consent directives have a policy context, which is any set of organizational or jurisdictional policies which may limit the consumer’s policy choices, and which include a named range of actions allowed. In addition, Privacy Consent Directives provide the ability for a healthcare consumer to delegate authority to a Substitute Decision Maker who may act on behalf of that individual. Alternatively, a consumer may author/publish their privacy preferences as a self-declared Privacy Consent Directive.

I have hard time trying to understand the structure of the emphasized part. In my understanding, the part is just a noun with the pronoun which, but it lacks a predicate. However, the part is used as if it was a sentence, maybe?

Exaggeratedly saying, the excerpt feels like to me

Hello, I'm John. Candy. I'm 5-year-old.

, where an irrelevant noun (i.e. Candy) is suddenly inserted between complete sentences.

I can understand the original part if it was written like

A Privacy Consent Directive as a legal record of a patient's (e.g. a healthcare consumer) agreement with a party responsible for enforcing the patient's choices is a directive which permits or denies identified actors or roles to perform actions affecting the patient within a given context for specific purposes and periods of time.

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    I’m voting to close this question because, as everyone says, this seems to be a simple typo. I'll just note three reasons in support of that: 1) The syntax is much better with "is" than with "as". 2) The error can be accounted for very easily (one letter difference). 3) It would make sense to define the term "Privacy Consent Directive" at the beginning of a section titled "Privacy Consent Directive".
    – MarcInManhattan
    Jul 7 at 1:39
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    @MarcInManhattan At the time of posting this question, as a non-native English speaker, I thought there would perhaps be a special rule in English where a noun without a predicate could be used as a sentence under some condition, because the excerpt is from a very formal and official document: I didn't even expect there would be a single typo in the whole document. As as result, however, this question turned to be just about a typo rather than essentially about English itself. So I don't mind if this question will be voted to close.
    – ynn
    Jul 7 at 1:53

1 Answer 1

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The as there is almost certainly a typo for is:

A Privacy Consent Directive is a legal record of a patient's (e.g. a healthcare consumer) agreement with a party responsible for enforcing the patient's choices, which permits or denies identified actors or roles to perform actions affecting the patient within a given context for specific purposes and periods of time.

A side note: even by the standards of technical writing, this document is awful. I'm sorry for anyone who has to make sense of this mess. Whoever wrote this is in urgent need of an exorcism.

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