
Happy National Nursing Week to my wonderful nurse friends!
Can you identify the countries in which these nurse uniforms were worn?

Happy National Nursing Week to my wonderful nurse friends!
Can you identify the countries in which these nurse uniforms were worn?

I’m so pleased to share, with her kind permission, this guest post written by Colette Herrick, originally published on the Six Seconds website. I especially love her example of how a new puppy taught her twin grandchildren a powerful lesson in compassion.
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“While medicine continues to advance, receiving health care as a patient is fundamentally a human process.
At the center of effective care delivery is a connection between the health care provider and patient. Yet in the last 25 years, many pressures have eroded the quality of this human-to-human healing connection. The good news is that in spite of all the external and very real pressures on the patient-provider relationship, research reveals something many of us have known: health care providers can learn fairly simple skills that make a large difference. Continue reading “Emotional intelligence in health care relationships”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Consider hearing the scary diagnosis of “heart failure” tripping lightly from your doctor’s lips as if it were no big deal. Can there be anything more terrifying and demoralizing than hearing that your heart is “failing”? And the words don’t even accurately reflect this condition, which actually means that your heart is not pumping blood as well as it should.
So why did doctors come up with this heart failure name, and what on earth were they thinking when they decided it would be a good idea to actually say these words out loud to Real Live Patients? And is there a less hurtful term they could use instead? Continue reading “When doctors use words that hurt”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
It’s a stressful time to be a patient these days, what with expectations running high that we should be both empowered and engaged while self-tracking every trackable health indicator possible – and of course retaining an all-important positive mental attitude – in order to change health care forever.
Whew. I had to go have a wee lie-down just thinking about how big that responsibility may seem on days when we patients are feeling, yes, sick – as an annoyingly significant number of patients living with a chronic and progressive illness tend to feel on any given day. That’s why we’re sometimes called “patients”. Continue reading “Patient engagement? How about doctor engagement?”