By finding “bucket holes.”
What?
Your eyes, ears, mind, and mouth can be a shovel against caving in to cancer.
America’s medical services can be disjointed when deployed to help long-term, serious illness. As our internist (the former elected President of our city’s trade association of physicians) advised, “Our country doesn’t have a health care system; it has a health care market. And what gets done is what’s there’s a market for and gets paid.”
What, no “system” to health care? Does that mean there may be a hole in my patient’s bucket? An overlooked aperture where needed “water” – that is, important information, documents, or communications – may leak out?
New Orleans stalwart r&b recording artist Eddie Bo reminded
all souls to be mindful and alert: “/Better Check Your Bucket/.”
If there are leaky, rusty spots in your patient’s path, then needed time, money, data, or other resources definitely might spill out of that space. How can you serve?
A cancer-caregiver can be a process analyst, in serving as an advocate. You can moonlight as a quality-control engineer. By adopting an attitude of part-time volunteer oversights-ombudsperson, you can shine a better light on the accuracy of the information created and shared by your loved one’s always-diverse, always-dispersed medical team.
You don’t have an Industrial Engineering degree. You needn’t claim certification in “Six Sigma” (the business-process methodology developed and popularized by uber-corporation G.E.), or a medical degree.
But you can watch, listen, ask questions, take notes, and whenever needed challenge, clarify, and even escalate, to get oversight on problem situations.
For example, what if an overworked nurse overlooks a file notation “Do not take blood pressure from right arm” (per lymphedema risks, after a mastectomy)? You’re not a doctor, but you can (and should!) be a healer, by halting an unnecessary error in a busy nurse’s work day: holler “Hold it!” when you see the wrong limb grabbed!
And if your patient gets care in more than one city or setting, do the new doctors have access to other, older medical records, from the prior vendor and venue? Can’t you ad-lib as a part-time medical records specialist, by building and bringing a complete, tabbed binder of prior medical reports, images, test results, and other documents, to help clear a cleaner path to better health?
Today I watched a friendly, polite, hard-working, and well-meaning floor nurse, striving to handle an unexpected complication, corrected by a specialist veteran nurse, in visiting from another department. All at a world-class facility, when delivering my family member’s long-planned, costly experimental care! What did I do (after feeling shock)? I asked the floor nurse to call the specialist in the other, absent department to come review the situation. She reflexively assured “non-medical” me that all was “under control” and “not to worry.” But I was firm: I said: “No, please call them, right now; you and I both know there’s a deadline deploying this expensive new medication; coordinating with them is necessary, very, very soon.” She disappeared and did so. And then just 10 minutes later the just-arriving veteran physician from another skyscraper suddenly appeared in our hospital room, took charge, and clarified “the rules,” overruling the guru veteran nurse. Later, my family member received the needed medication, after layperson-aided teamwork overcame the catheter confusion.
Medication flows to my patient, only after some caregiver contribution to the flow of medical professionals' communications.
It’s not just your patient with internal problems. It’s every organization and hard-working professional. So you’ve got a role in this path.
/There’s A Hole In Your Bucket/
/And It Goes Right Through/
/Said I, There’s A Hole/
/In The Donut Too/.
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