Use Research Facts to Make Your Practice Indispensable

We all have news feeds that pop up on our devices. No two people see the same suggestions because they are tailored to our interests by whatever app produces them, based on what we have shown interest in before.

(I don’t know about you, but sometimes I am a bit creeped out by the articles that appear on my feed – like Big Brother is now reading my mind!) But I digress….

A few weeks ago, this article from Vox appeared on my news feed and it struck me in a huge way; a way that Vox never even intended:

Don’t Get Surgery on a Friday

The article is an overview of research published around the world on the negative outcomes that more often occur for surgeries that take place on Fridays (even late on Thursdays) and what their potential causes might be. Those causes range from the fact that often the more experienced surgeons take off for long weekends, to the fact that the support staff (nurses, techs, etc) who work weekends are both overworked and less experienced, and more. Such situations leave patients at the mercy of “less” – less experienced care and less/fewer resources.

I know this to be true. In fact, a long-time patient empowerment colleague, Helen Haskell, lost her young son, Lewis, to a Friday surgery because the weekend staff available to jump in when his vitals began going south didn’t have the necessary experience to keep him alive. Lewis died four days later.

Why did the article strike such a chord with me?

Because my story is parallel. Mine is not a story of surgery (although I did have a minor surgery to remove a small tumor from my torso.) It is a story of misdiagnosis, which happened for very similar reasons as these Friday surgery negative outcomes. In my case, the misdiagnosis was affected by the fact that the tumor was removed on June 30 (2004) – shortly after medical school graduations, and the day before July 1 – meaning – the most experienced lab workers and pathologists had taken off on vacations. That left recently-graduated med students running the lab – and misdiagnosing me – the ripple effect from which life-altering decisions, which might have killed me, were made.

If Vox had written an article about my personal circumstance, it would have read

Don’t Be Diagnosed Using
Pathology Results in July

So how does any of this affect, or help health and patient advocates – and even more importantly – their clients? And how can this sort of information keep them safer or support their journeys?

It’s not a big leap to how this kind of information can keep your clients safe during the very dangerous pursuit that healthcare can be. You can collect these sorts of pieces of advice to pull out when they are needed to not just affect the choices they make, but to amaze them as well.

You can hear them now:

“I never thought about that!”

What client wouldn’t pause to reconsider the day of the week they will have an important surgery based on your sharing of this sort of information? No client will choose a day/date that puts their lives – or quality of their lives – in peril!

But for the purposes of this post, just as importantly, the fact that YOU, the advocate, raised this point with them, on a topic they never heard of before, will impress the stuffing out of them! it will bring you instant credibility,. In addition, they will turn around and share your wisdom with friends, along with their source for the information – you!

So where can you find these informational tidbits?

It’s not difficult. Use whatever app you get your news from (I get mine from three different sources: MSN (Microsoft News), Google News, and SmartNews. Within each app, I am subscribed to healthcare and medical care news, and several outlets I know produce the kinds of news in which I am interested – Vox is one of them.

Then, as these pieces are published, you can read them and assess whether they’ll be useful to you and your clients. (And – in case you’re interested – there are many of these sorts of tips, including choosing certain days of the week for surgery, in my book, You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes (How to Fix Them to Get the Healthcare You Deserve)