I find the nascent emergence of end of life (EOL) discussion in American society welcome, dangerous, and alarming. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about EOL matters so much since 2004/2005 during and since my parents’ demises, terminally hospitalized, when my work took root. Maybe I should have anticipated. [The […]
I’ve been online since before the days of CompuServe, one of the early internet discussion environments. Without claiming internet expertise, I’ve seen my share of message boards and behaviors, including involvement in occasional disagreements and flames. These days I find myself among a cohort of medical patient activists who have suffered various degrees of harm […]
The Mayo Clinic has started an annual social media in healthcare conference. This time around Mayo is offering all-expenses paid scholarships, awarded on the judging of essays that make the cut after an initial round of social media likes and comments. My essay appears below. Some of what it contains I’ve written before in this […]
Today a gift arrived via email. Sandy Booth of Crossings Care Circle , providing home funeral guidance for people in and around Austin, Texas, attended conferences in 2011 and 2012 at which I presented. She sent me some excerpts from Wendell Berry’s 2005 novel, Hanna Coulter. I’m an ok writer, but Berry is a *writer*, as these […]
I try to stay upbeat about end of life stuff because (a) I’ve figured out a lot about it, untangling and reweaving what, in my best assessment, we need to know and act on to maximize our chances of dying in peace, and (b) I believe that when my fellow citizens know also, they’ll feel […]
The Leapfrog Group’s new website scoring hospital safety has gone live. Check out hospitals nearest you in your community, in nearby communities, and around the country.
. Sometimes a little verse goes a longer way. Just in case you want to die in peace:
Inexplicable. Why would the American Hospital Association balk at moving into the 21st century like a batch of other countries’ health systems have done, and get up to speed using electronic patient records? Federal law requires hospitals to continue e-record development and to provide patients with their e-records soon after discharge. Now comes a letter […]
Beth Boynton’s short video documents a training session this RN consultant conducted with some nurses exploring the nature and effect of constant interruption on their emotional and cognitive well-being (hint: negative). This is a most important issue. I can tell you that nurse understaffing is one root cause of harm (where “root” means patient-family experience/outcome, […]
The following is a 750-word op-ed that originally appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera on 4.8.12. At first I didn’t think I could condense a day-long conversation into 1150 words (I mimicked the word count that paid freelance columnists get). I did—but papers really do enforce their word counts for you and me so that […]
