Editor's Update:
The Phoenix HealthCare Newsletter has a readership that transcends all aspects of healthcare. We started the newsletter in 1995 as a by-product of a book written as an Operations Manual on Integrated Delivery Systems. With a readership that has as its core value- providing high quality care in many venues that they are aligned. Primary care settings, acute care , long term care. We have addressed operational, financial, medical management and those interventions that will improve the delivery of health care services.
The Phoenix HealthCare Newsletter has a readership that transcends all aspects of healthcare. We started the newsletter in 1995 as a by-product of a book written as an Operations Manual on Integrated Delivery Systems. With a readership that has as its core value- providing high quality care in many venues that they are aligned. Primary care settings, acute care , long term care. We have addressed operational, financial, medical management and those interventions that will improve the delivery of health care services.
We want to focus on the senior years of a person’s life in this lst quarter of 2015. We have attended and shared the proceeding of the American Society of Aging in previous newsletters. We have been particularly impressed by a recent book-Being Mortal by Dr.Atul Gawande( Metropolitan Books-Henry Holt and Company). The author addresses the continuum of being independent and the concomitant events of when our bodies fail. His research into skilled nursing care, assisted living and their face are poignant.
His deception from a physician’s perspective as well as a son add to his passion and professionalism. His opening citation is telling- “I see it now-this world is swiftly passing” the warrior Karma in the Mahabharata.
Mortality, communication, choices,decision-making,coping, scientific advances, dying and death, tragedies of life, technology, are just some of the insights we all need to address as practitioners, providers, payers, caregivers and yes as our role as patients.
In order to address all of the above we need to be innovative, compassionate, caring, objective and yes honest in all of our transactions with patient’s , their families and with ourselves-tall orders!
We all know the numbers, of living ,aging and ultimately we all die of something. Sorry! Let’s extend quality of life through qualitative and caring ways. This needs to be our overarching plan and agenda.
We dedicate ourselves in 2015 and beyond to sharing and participating, not on the sidelines but in the forefront.
Peacefully,
Bill Shaw
Editor
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