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ePatient

Aug 06 2012
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Me? or Populations?

By Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient
One of the challenges for the health care team – patient, caregivers, and professionals – is arriving at the patient’s personal goal of the moment and collaborating toward reaching that goal. I have found myself struggling to differentiate the likelihood of treatment success for a population versus the likely effect for me, my patient, or family member.  As my neurologist says to me, you are not the population. What works or happens for populations doesn’t necessarily happen or work for you. As a multiple sclerosis patient effects of treatment choices on populations is only one consideration got me. For example, I know that I will take no medication that makes me depressed or even less optimistic, no matter its proven clinical effects. My health team knows this.
Have you confronted such dilemmas in seeking best health?
Aug 02 2012
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Improv and Health Leadership

By Caregiver, Clinician, Consumer, ePatient, Leader

Why improv and health leadership? Health experience is unique, of the moment, a journey. A different possible riff every moment.

The patient, client, consumer (let me use the term consumer for now) expects safe, quality, kind, empathetic care and service from professionals and their organizations-it’s a given. Even when safe, quality, and kind are present the health journey can be a very rough road. The challenge for the professional and support staff is to maximize the ability to know and relate to consumers as individuals and respond to the roadblocks, detours, potholes of that journey. 

The compliments my peers hear about health care are not usually about saving a life, successful surgery, hand washing. Rather it’s about the housekeeper who brought coloring books to the child; it’s about the nurse who knew the child’s passion for Ninja Turtles and brought a Ninja Turtle balloon to the bedside or exam room; it’s about the doctor who called the family on her day off; it’s about the registrar who found a private space for a mother to breast feed a non-patient child. These leverage the whole experience positively.

The relationship between professional caregivers and consumers includes constant improv-discretion to customize response and interaction and go off script. Yet the capacity of caregivers to stay up-to-date in their knowledge, compliant with practice and regulation, and productive while still able to improvise approaches superpower.

How can professionals and support staff tap their inner superpower without the intentional complicity of their leaders? Health leaders model and create the conditions that cultivate and learn from this improv. More about those conditions in the next blog.

Jul 31 2012
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Improv and Best Health

By Clinician, ePatient, Musician

Why improv and health? Health is unique, of the moment, a journey. A different possible riff every moment. Successful maneuvering the roller coaster of dis-ease depends on religious taking care of what is well with your instrument; on you and your team dynamics; on the predictability and responsiveness of the tune: systems and infrastructure through which you journey; listening for the germ of truth in yourself, your caregivers, and professionals. Best health seeks simplicity: values, mission, common sense and of course chutzpah when you can afford it. The rest is commentary.

How is your health improv?

Jul 27 2012
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Superpowers

By Caregiver, ePatient, Family man

What are my superpowers? What are your superpowers? Love having this conversation with my grandson. Today, he has atomic breath like Godzilla (especially in the morning). I first had this conversation with my son when we first knew he was dying of cancer. His superpower was poetry. 

i am not things.
i am sums of things,
guessing that i’m part of God,
wondering if there is some place
where my soul will go
from where i might look down
with advantages my eyes did not have
and see the tops of trees
which i used to walk beneath for
shelter from rain and sun,
and see the way things go together
like continental tracts of land
punctuated by water and lights
and roads and other concrete artifices

Preface to “the way I become about dying” by Michael P Funk, 2002

When diagnosed with MS, my superpower became the ability to accept what is. Superpowers are a magic lever for best health.

What are your superpowers?

Jul 25 2012
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Exercise – the instant magic lever

By Clinician, ePatient
Seems like a no brainer. Exercise, the instant magic lever for best health. Profoundly affects spiritual, mental, and physical health. One of the ways I discovered that I had multiple sclerosis was my inability to stay on a bicycle. I kept falling off when I stopped. Receiving the diagnosis was sobering at best! Sometimes very sad and depressing. Six months after my diagnosis I bought a Recumbent tricycle. I cried with relief that I could still get my favorite exercise. Can’t fall off a trike. Good for my soul, good for my heart, good for my quads. The direct connection between activity and recovery is so well documented.

How have we redesigned healthcare to include more activity? In that last 20 years patients walk right away after surgery and recover much more quickly. When I was an ICU manager we incorporated more activity into our standard operating procedure. We needed to use the families and caregivers to increase activity. We struggled with reluctant patients. But more activity for patients led to fewer complications, shorter stays, and better outcomes. Good for staff as well.  Have we taken this far enough? Do we build our organizational systems to maximize activity for staff?  I wonder if the magic levers of best health are obvious but fundamentally challenging-like the golden rule. Obvious and tough. 


What have you done to include physical activity in the routine of care giving?
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