patient advocacy

The Binder, the Meltdown, and Some Advocacy Karma, Too

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I beg your indulgence today as I relate a personal story. I don’t usually do this – rarely do I share this much personal information! But I promise you, if you stick with it – it will make sense by the end. As mentioned in last week’s post, my husband and I are getting ready to move. In less than three weeks, we’ll have begun settling in more than 1200 miles away. Since we will have no basement (!) and since it’s just really about d*mn time (!) – we are cleaning out, purging really – getting rid of the …

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These 8 Yard Sale Lessons May Improve Your Advocacy Practice

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We’ve made the decision. We’re leaving the cold Northeastern winters behind, and in just a few weeks my husband and I will be moving south. We’ve sold our home in Upstate NY. We’ve purchased a home in Florida. We’ve planned the details for the actual move itself… The continuing challenge is one that will sound familiar to many of you. We have way too much stuff! We were newlyweds when we moved into our current home in 2007. We jammed two entire households worth of stuff into this home – most of it was simply moved to the basement. Then …

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Patient Advocates and The Kindergarten Principles

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You may remember Robert Fulghum’s book, published in the 1980s, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten… The book is a group of essays focused on the wisdom that helps us lead a good life – basic tenets including sharing, being kind to one another, cleaning up after ourselves and living a balanced life. The book and its basics have come to mind so many times in recent months during exchanges with some of the patient advocates who have reached out to me. Their outreach, a mix of questions, complaints, reports and misinformation, leaves me scratching my …

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Mixed Messages Are Just a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen

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A few weeks ago, I wrote Fool Me Once, Shame on You, But Fool Me Twice about the problems that can hurt patient-clients which also hurt our profession because they violate our ethical principles and best practices. Those problems range from advocates working beyond their own abilities to help clients because they may not have the experience or education to do so, to selling medical products on their websites, and others. Today we’re looking at the promised Example #2 of this problem in hopes of a hard stop. That problem: the danger of mixed messages. As stated in the Fool …

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Fool Me Once, Shame on You, But Fool Me Twice….

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From bold-faced lies to misrepresentation – facts that aren’t facts, withholding information, skirting the code of ethics, and shades of truth – honesty and the advocacy business have been on my mind. This topic was actually triggered by something that has nothing to do with advocacy at all, something that seems relatively innocuous, but then, maybe not-so-innocuous at all: the purchase of a 5-lb bag of sugar to bake holiday cookies last December. Now a 5-lb bag of sugar has always been a 5-lb bag of sugar and has yielded a certain number of batches of cookies. I’ve been buying …

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Let’s Play Jeopardy!

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Channeling Alex Trebec here? a few answers for you, with questions that may sound familiar? Most stem from real patients and caregivers who seek help getting what they need from the healthcare system. Your job is to figure out what the question is, then, hopefully, to act accordingly.

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