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Cynthia Meyer created the Second Wind Movement for retirees to live their best life. She teaches mini-goals and micro-stepping towards the 5 Rings of Retirement, Growth, Health, Finance, Community, and Giving Back. Listen in or read on.
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It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere. I can’t help but see almost everything I do in my advocacy through the lens of health equity. Whether it’s making decisions about our health and medical care, managing pain, young adults with complex medical issues transitioning from pediatric to adult medicine, men in caregiving, data sharing, patient access to data. Everywhere. I’m defining equity as people having the same opportunity to achieve best physical, mental and spiritual health no matter their social circumstances, biology, genetics, or physical environment. I wanted to take a look at bias, inclusion and equity from outside healthcare. So, I interviewed Ame Sanders and we talked about our own biases, inclusion or lack thereof in our communities, measuring bias, and taking action to reduce inequities.
Ame Sanders and I met at Seth Godin’s Podcasting Fellowship, 350 or so people from around the world learning to be podcasters. Ame caught my eye with her podcast, Equity Warriors, and her company www.stateofinclusion.com. See the show notes for further information. We decided to interview each other. You can hear Ame’s interview of me at the link above. Being a practical person, I look for what works and what we can learn from other people’s experiences. While Ame doesn’t work in the health care space, she has much to teach us about the state of inclusion in communities. Read More
I’m preparing to attend a California Compassionate Care Coalition palliative care conference #cccc17 in a week. I’m reminded of the power of community in advancing good health practices. I have two stories. The first is about the ongoing public health collaboration since 1993 in LaCrosse, WI to meet and sustain very high rates of advanced care planning and following documented preferences through end of life. A group of people organized a region-wide initiative to elicit, understand, document, and honor a patient’s preferences about future medical care. As a result end of life preferences are a regular part of community conversation, documents became easier to understand and use, some electronic medical records facilitated access to choices, and following the choices became standard practice. In 2010 90% has a plan, 99% were available in the medical record, and 99.5% of the time treatment was consistent with preferences. (See the Journal of American Geriatrics Society). Amazing! Read More
I spoke with a friend this week who felt like a stranger in a strange land. She’s recently moved to a community with almost no experience with Muslims, people from West Africa, or with those with chronic pain from a genetic disease. Every encounter presents challenges drawing on her charisma, empathy, dignity and ability to adapt and educate – sometimes during the crisis of severe pain. During my friend’s medical encounters she does not face a health literacy dilemma. She is usually more expert about her culture and her health challenges than the medical professionals she meets. She faces a life literacy dilemma. In my life as a patient and career as a clinician, I face an infinite variety of people, cultures, and situations different from my own or my comfort. I am often at a loss at how to engage this range of clinicians (as a patient) and people (as a clinician). How can we proactively prepare for so much unknown and unfamiliar? Read More
I’m a technology nerd and early adopter while also a profound technology skeptic. My heart sings when communities of people solve problems that matter to them and theirs and then look for technology partners to automate and share their solutions. By community, I mean partnerships of people at the center of care (people, care partners, clinicians) and neighborhoods, counties and states.
Recently, I spent a few days with big data, technology, entrepreneurs, and healthcare under the big top of Health 2.0 in Palo Alto. CA – a relatively low-key festival of mostly entrepreneurs trying to sell big data and apps with the edge of worry about engaging patients in their data and products. I felt at home with my advocacy and community browsing new ideas and new uses for technology Read More
In our 30’s we lived in West Virginia – very rural, back-to-the-land hippies, eight miles up a dirt road. We participated in many communities. Our intentional community of families shared 180 acres of land, helped each other build our houses, raised our kids together, home schooled, with some facsimile of farming – garden, bees, fruit trees, chickens. Another community was the town emergency squad where I volunteered as a paramedic and my wife drove the ambulance. Read More
