Patient Advocacy Quotes

What does emerge, in any case, is an awareness that the elusive but dominating Subject of the Old Testament cannot be comprehended in any preconceived categories.1 The God of the Old Testament does not easily conform to the expectation of Christian dogmatic theology, nor to the categories of any Hellenistic perennial philosophy. As a result, most of our categories are unhelpful for the elucidation of this Subject, and we shall have to proceed concretely, a text at a time, a detail at a time. The Character who will emerge from such a patient study at the end will still be elusive and more than a little surprising.

More and more, providers are being held to higher (legal) standards of care without the appropriate support from their employers. That is, medics are being investigated and sanctioned at a more aggressive rate than ever before over smaller and smaller clinical infractions. To get with the times, agencies need to spend much more of their allotted training time on skills like 12 lead EKG application and interpretation, assessment algorithms, and intubation or advanced parenteral route access, for example. The list of available and important topics is as long and diverse as the national, state, and local scopes of practice. On the other hand, agencies that resist this reality cannot be surprised to discover that their care is generally substandard, for which there can be grave legal consequences. They can’t throw their bottles on the floor and cry because they don’t have them. I predict that any agency that emphasizes drilling on patient care as much as or even more than firefighting will very quickly see a dramatic shift in the culture from EMS apathy to EMS advocacy. That culture shift should be a welcome bonus; the key benefit being finally providing the superior care about which they already brag. Yes, there will be some resistance at first and that is great. Resistance is the surest way to quickly identify those who are not committed, because they will whine and complain the most and they will require the most work. If they are not willing to do the work, then maybe they don’t belong.

There simply are no truly independent sources of research in the US. Industry funding has extended its reach into every sector, from medical journals that present and interpret the research to universities and contract research entities that conduct the research to patient advocacy organizations that promote various treatments to medical education for doctors to the agencies that are supposed to protect the public interest—including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and, of course, the FDA.

1.    Define and articulate the role and functions of social work in end-of-life care in a consistent manner across all settings. 2.    Address negative public and professional perceptions of social work internally and externally. 3.    Identify and articulate specific and unique contributions of the social work profession in end-of-life care. 4.    Facilitate and promote end-of-life social work research that demonstrates the utility and efficiency of social work in hospice. 5.    Facilitate collaborative advocacy at the macro level to ensure access to quality interdisciplinary end-of-life care for all people. 6.    Actively challenge shortsighted cost-saving initiatives that minimize the psychosocial and spiritual components of care for patients and families. 7.    Develop standards for effective models of practice in end-of-life care.

Respected physician Dr. Anna Vertkin specializes in Gastroenterology, dedicated to enhancing patient health through expertise and advocacy.

She, like other whites in the birth control movement, saw the role of Black leaders and health professionals as facilitating their organizations’ efforts among the Black population. They incorporated Blacks in their advocacy to help raise funds and to give legitimacy to the movement’s projects in Black communities. But Black members of advisory councils were not invited to participate in national planning, nor were they allowed to manage the clinics that served Black patients.