Podcast

Our guest today is Bonnie Friedman, author of Hospital Warrior: How to Get the Best Care for Your Loved One, which demystifies the process and provides the tools, understanding and insight you need to get the best care for your loved one. Based on Bonnie’s own experiences fighting for her husband’s healthcare needs for more than 24 years and through 14 separate hospitalizations, Hospital Warrior lays out in direct, simple terms hard-learned and time-tested tactics to help ensure a loved one’s medical needs are met.

Bonnie’s husband Bob had a heart attack in 1990. It was the beginning a very long road. Bonnie knew very little about taking care of someone in the hospital other than:

1. Be at the hospital as much as you can
2. Call for help, if you suspect something is wrong
3. Always have a box of chocolates for the nurses

The realities of medical care are that someone needs to connect the dots – keep communication moving and managed. That’s what health advocacy is all about.

On being thrown into the world of being a caregiver:
“I felt completely unprepared for what I had to do, but I had to do it.”

Main message of the book:
“I want to help people find a little more comfort in speaking and and speaking out because they have something to contribute.”

On finding a voice as an advocate:
‘Having the courage and feeling the empowerment to speak up is really transformative in terms of the interaction and the respect that comes back to you.’

Chapter 1: Taking Care of Yourself – the important role of the caregiver

Chapter 2: Getting Started – Hurry up and wait!
The long, slow process of healthcare

Chapter 3: Figuring Out the Hospital – Visiting a foreign land!

Chapter 4: Understanding Special Units – Travel to other planets!

Book Basics:
• Grounding – understanding the who’s and what’s of the hospital space
• Suggested questions to ask in the hospital environment

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groop

The No BS Marketing Show, Audible is offering a free download with a 30-day trial to give you the opportunity to check out their service. You can download it for free today.

Bonnie’s Tool or Tip:
MedPage – a CE and CME accredited medical news service, provides free continuing education to healthcare professionals in addition to the latest news.

KevinMD
Over 2,000 authors contribute to KevinMD.com: front-line primary care doctors, surgeons, specialist physicians, nurses, medical students, policy experts.  And of course, patients, who need the medical profession to hear their voices.

Follow Bonnie on Twitter @Bonniecomm
Website

Publisher – People Tested Media