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Part II: The Dirty Dozen Skills, Abilities, and Attributes of Successful Health and Patient Advocates and Care Managers

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Yes, Part II, as promised in our first installment last week when we began with the first four attributes of successful advocates. Find Part I of the Dirty Dozen. Which of these describe you and your abilities? Which of them don’t? Where do you go from here? Do your own assessment! Part II: Abilities of Success Health/Patient Advocates and Care Managers 5. Health and patient advocates and care managers have an intimate understanding of the healthcare system. Important – I do not mean you must understand medicine. In fact, you really don’t need to understand medicine – as in diagnosis […]

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A Career, a Profession, and a Calling with Responsibility, Too

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Most of us working as advocates apply the word “profession” to our work. Those who have been advocates for a longer period of time might tell you it has turned into a career. I often hear from new advocates, or those who wannabe advocates that they feel that this profession of advocacy (or what might evolve for them to a career of advocacy) is also a calling. So let’s look at that word “calling” for a minute. Merriam Webster tells us that a calling is: a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action especially when accompanied by conviction

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Hey Little Girls: Yes, Women Can Be Brilliant!

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(To my gentleman readers – please pardon this week’s post. You are more than welcome to read it, of course, and there will be advantages to doing so, but it’s really aimed at the females among us. That will make sense momentarily.) This week’s post comes as a result of three experiences from the past few weeks, all reminders of the necessity of tooting one’s own horn. We’ll set the stage with one of those experiences; that is, publication this week by the AP of this article Little girls doubt that women can be brilliant, study shows Now, I’m a

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Misleading Headline Provides an Opportunity

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This week the Chicago Tribune featured patient advocacy as a growing trend – a marvelous exposure to private advocacy for the uninitiated (uninitiated = most of the known universe). Several of our APHA members were mentioned in the article and for the most part, it was an excellent representation of the status of private advocacy. Except for the headline: Now, most of us are intelligent enough to know that headlines are created to suck in readers, and too often, intentionally focus on some point that doesn’t really represent the story – just draws those readers. And so it was with

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Celebrating the 5th Annual Private Professional Patient Advocates Week

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Our Fifth Annual Private Professional Patient Advocates Week is this week – March 16 to 22 -and I’m here to share tales of the growth of our profession. Can it be that patient advocacy as a profession is now so “old” ? Granted, there were a handful of advocates practicing long before we began to quantify and qualify the profession. The year 2009, with the launch of NAHAC and APHA / AdvoConnection, marked the beginning of the growth that would make us a recognized profession across North America. Some background: From the 30-ish people who joined AdvoConnection in 2009 – for

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And They Called it Puppy L-o-o-ve

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…. Remember when you were a teenager in puppy love> Oh! You couldn’t stand to be away from the new person in your life! You knew you would love each other forever – but the rest of the world that was getting in the way of that love. THEY thought you were too young, but you knew better! …. And they called it puppy love Oh I guess they’ll never know How a young heart really feels And why I love her so It was the highest of highs, finding love for the first time! Like no other, you couldn’t

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Monetizing, Scaling – Making Smart Choices Affects Your Advocacy Practice and Income

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An email this week comes from one of our APHA members, who I will call Bernice, who reminds me of how easy it is to lose sight of what is important to us when it comes to building our advocacy practices. Bernice is in the process of entering a business plan competition which, if she wins, will provide her with a $10,000 grant to help her grow her practice. Her concern is, that in order to win the money, she is going to have to write a business plan that’s about “going big.” From her email to me: “We have

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