On the heels of National Family Caregivers Month in November, which this year carried the theme of “Supercharge Your Caregiving,” here is a way to carry out that charge year-round. And carry it out we must, because health care can no longer ignore these folks. The Caregiver Action Network estimates that there are over 90 million Americans doing this critical work, which is largely publicly invisible, unpaid, and underappreciated. The Josie King...

The Josie King Foundation believes that nurses are leading the charge for a safer, more compassionate health care system. But they realize that in addition to the joys of healing, nurses face many emotional upheavals related to patient suffering, a complex workplace, new technologies, and fear of clinical errors. When personal pressures from everyday living are added to the already heavy load, the weight can lead to nurse stress, anxiety,...

By Hayley Phelan Oct. 25, 2018 It was my ex-husband who got me journaling again. Our marriage was falling apart, and, on the advice of his friend, he had started to do “morning pages,” a daily journaling practice from the seminal self-help book “The Artist’s Way.” Though I had kept a diary throughout my teen years and early 20s, somewhere along the way I’d fallen out of the habit. At 29, though, I was deeply unhappy and looking for answers...

By Tim Cunningham He collapsed at school by his locker, just 11 years old. After 9-1-1 was called, the EMTs arrived and began CPR immediately. He was brought to our emergency department and we did everything we could — IVs, ventilation, sympathomimetic drips — but nothing worked. We couldn’t save him. The attending physician declared him dead — calling the code and noting time of death — as we, without a moment’s hesitation, stepped back into...

Hospitals cannot improve the patient experience without listening to — and acting on — patient feedback, Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, senior vice president for clinical safety at Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealthcare, said in a 2015 blog post for Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. Dr. Pronovost formerly served as director of the Armstrong Institute and senior vice president for...

Patient safety is part of the patient experience promise clinicians make. Clinicians must integrate the patient into the care team to deliver on that promise. Source: Thinkstock  By Sara Heath April 09, 2018 – When a patient visits a hospital, she has the expectation that she will be treated with empathy, respect, and clinical excellence. At the core of each of these elements is the understanding that she will be safe. But all too often,...