The Patient Survival Guide

Gold Winner 2012 Foreword Reviews Book of The Year, Health Category The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 1.7 million people developed healthcare acquired infections in 2010. Since most people spend only a small part of their lives in healthcare facilities, this guidebook also tells readers how to avoid picking up serious infections in day care centers, schools, business offices, and other common locations. Unlike other books, which focus on how to change the hospital systems, The Patient Survival Guide focuses on empowering you with the knowledge and techniques to ensure a safer healthcare experience. The Patient Survival Guide: Inspires you to be a your own advocate Describes in vivid detail how your preparation and informed vigilance can significantly reduce the chances of harm and death to your loved one in a hospital Provides specific, practical, and outside-the-box strategies for anticipating and preventing errors, with chapters devoted to each of the most common mistakes and mishaps Provides checklists for patients to use upon admission to healthcare facilities

Hospital Survival Guide: The Patient Handbook to Getting Better and Getting Out is the essential patient handbook to ensure that you and your family emerge from hospital visits healthier than before checking-in and without having to endure excessive stays, pain or indignities. Includes practical tips, warnings and surprising information you doctor might not tell you, such as the fact that July, when the new interns start, is the most dangerous month to have a procedure done at a teaching hospital; EMLA anesthetic cream can be requested to be used on children's skin, allowing for less painful I.V. starts; and washing off all iodine-based antiseptics thoroughly after surgery can prevent chemical burns. Proven tips for reducing hospital bills are also presented.

In the US medical environment where medical mistakes, over-diagnosis, and over-treatment have become the third leading cause of death, leadership consultant and long-time charity CEO Edward Morgan argues that protecting yourself with medical wisdom can add 10-15 years to your life. We're a nation on meds, where 60% of adults are now diagnosed with some chronic condition. We're listening to unwise advice and becoming permanent patients. Longevity is declining in America, even though medical costs in the US are twice that of other developed nations. Don't get caught in medical misadventures that escalate into permanent conditions, screenings that cascade into fear-driven decisions, prescriptions that simply suppress symptoms, or worst of all, end up dying in an ICU in the vain hope for a few more days. Smart is not the same as wise. Medical wisdom and discernment will extend your life. Taking today's aggressive, profit-driven advice will quite possibly shorten it. Living to see your grandchildren grow up is your responsibility, not your doctor's. This is a must read for anyone already feeling like a patient for life.

Fifth Edition. Pulmonary Hypertension: A Patient's Survival Guide serves as a soup-to-nuts resource book covering many of the questions patients and their loved ones might have about living with pulmonary hypertension. The book (350+ pages) includes topics like the mechanics of PH, the latest treatments, patient care and lifestyle issues.

Each year, one out of every four hospital patients in the United States will be harmed by the care they receive. Over 400,000 will die as a result. Dr. Gretchen LeFever Watson's definitive guide empowers patients to be patient safety advocates. It takes a village to combat preventable errors and omissions that cause millions of deaths and sickness in our nation’s hospitals and care facilities. Although most of these deaths are due to human and system errors—not faulty medical decisions or diagnoses—this annual death toll—as well as the millions of additional incidents of survivable patient harm—could be cut in half through consistent use of simple and nearly cost-free safety behaviors. In Your Patient Safety Survival Guide, Gretchen LeFever Watson delivers a patient-centered blueprint on how to transform the patient-safety movement so that millions of unnecessary illnesses and deaths in hospitals, outpatient facilities, and nursing homes can be avoided. She provides key safety habits that people must learn to recognize so they can be sure hospital personnel use them during every patient encounter. She also explains how addressing the most common safety problems will set the stage for tackling a wide range of issues, including healthcare’s role in the overuse of opiate painkillers and its related heroin epidemic. Watson’s call for a more sensible societal response to medical and human error in hospitals promotes a timely and full disclosure of all mistakes—an approach that has been proven to accelerate the emotional recovery of everyone affected by patient safety events while also reducing the financial burden on hospitals, providers, and patients. Readers will learn how to: • Change behavior to catch medical errors before they result in illness or death. • Prevent the spread of dangerous infections in hospitals and other care facilities. • Leverage the power of basic safety/hygiene habits. • Eliminate mistakes during surgery and other invasive procedures. • Avoid medication errors and the overuse of opiates • Raise awareness and inspire civic action in their communities.

The book is a story of one patient's remarkable journey from victim, to observer, to program solver. While struggling to save her life against caregivers who wouldn't listen, she realized that she was only one amongst many patients trapped in the same depersonalizing system. What began as a simple attempt at survival, over time became a desire to do something for others in the same boat. She decided to create a how-to self-care-healing guide for patients based upon her own personal experience during the three and a half months of futile attempts to put a name to her mystery disease. Later, she turned her attention to finding the means to reform the system itself. Having been exposed to all the chinks in a mismanaged health care system, she knew the problems began the moment patients met their primary care physicians (a good place to start).

Fifth Edition, 2013 Revision. Pulmonary Hypertension: A Patient's Survival Guide serves as a soup-to-nuts resource book covering many of the questions patients and their loved ones might have about living with pulmonary hypertension. The book (350+ pages) includes topics like the mechanics of PH, the latest treatments, patient care and lifestyle issues.