Blanched by anemia, Mary rested quietly in the hospital bed. Her pallor made her barely visible amid the bleached bed linens--she seemed a mere shock of white hair against the pillowcase.
Age ninety-three, she'd visited the hospital a half-dozen times in as many months, shuttling between nursing home and hospital as many elders unwittingly do in their last year of life. She may have preferred to stay put, but no one ...
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As a 24-hour-a-day, seven days a week, on-call nurse practitioner serving elderly and frail patients, my work day is anything but typical. I start my day not at a hospital or clinic, but at my dining room table. There, I document patient visits from the day before, write up my notes and place an average of 10 or more calls—ranging from setting up appointments to calling my patient’s family members ...
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Have you ever been to a Genius Bar at an Apple store?
The last time I was there -- checking out a pesky problem on my iPhone -- I couldn't help but wonder: why can't we have something like that to deal with our common health issues?
Genius Bars are located in Apple Stores in easy-to-access shopping areas, like malls. The Genius Bars are ...
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You probably know patients who present with entitled attitudes and you may think there’s not much you can do about them. Entitled patients often demand excessive attention and may question your competence when they are not satisfied with how important you make them feel.
By using one or more of the following approaches, you can manage entitled patients respectfully while reducing your risk of stress and burnout.
1. Be on the same ...
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“Maybe we shouldn’t urge people to engage in their health care: it sets them up for failure and punishment from their clinicians.”
A senior patient advocate and researcher recently made this comment to a gathering of experts in patient engagement.
For a few minutes, I was inclined to agree with her. I thought back over the previous three months: the passive aggressive (and aggressive-aggressive) responses of some of my clinicians to my ...
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In the business of medicine, one of the brightest hopes is the potential for re-optimizing our spend around what patients want. That’s important because decades of research in the field of shared decision making have shown that when there’s a range of options to treat a condition, informed patients choose less spending and less invasive treatment.
That’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, the University of Chicago press release ...
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You’ve heard all of the advice about backing up your computer regularly, making sure that you have your passwords stored in a safe place, protecting yourself against digital identity theft, but what does that have to do with providing care for a person with special needs?
Let’s count the ways.
First: Resources. Much of the information you need is online, and your personalized data may be password-protected. Anyone who has ever been ...
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When I began to gather my thoughts for this piece, I asked my husband what he thought. It was eye-opening. Even after twelve years of illness, I forget that his life has been impacted as much as mine by my health limitations. This is partly because he’s changed his major task in life to that of caregiver and partly because we can no longer do most of the things we ...
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No one goes to a hospital to heal. They go because they must--as I did three years ago, when a one-hour colonoscopy turned into a four-day surgical sleepover.
My grandfather had warned me long ago against hospitals. "You don't want to go there," he said. "That's where the sick people are." Pop died at the age of ninety-four, at home.
His warning came strongly to mind as I walked into the place ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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