Betty Long

Contributing Editor Betty Long outlines five hospital rules that can, and sometimes should, be challenged by patients and families.

We talk a good game in the health care system. We say we want to empower patients, but how powerful do we really want them to be? We say we want to give them enough information so they can make informed choices, but how do we deliver that information so that patients truly understand what is being said? As health care reform continues and open enrollment periods occur, encourage your employees to know that they are the key to this empowerment that everyone's talking about. Thus, it's important that they be educated about, and encouraged to exercise, their medical freedoms - specifically, the freedom to request the surgeon of your preference.

A dear friend, who is a veteran nurse, recently told me about her husband's post-operative experience. The surgery itself went well; immediately after his return to the nursing unit, he was appropriately asked by his nurse, "How is your pain?" Using the almost-universal pain scale, she asked him to rate his pain from zero (being no pain at all) to 10 (being the worst pain you've ever experienced).

As you consider offering more value-added benefits to your employee population, I encourage you to think about seriously offering long-term care insurance. As many of us are seeing our parents and other family members live well into their 80s and 90s, it's more and more likely that the elderly people in our lives will at some point need long-term care services. It's the rare and fortunate elderly person who continues to live independently in his or her own home without home care services.

Flummoxed by how your employees make their health care decisions? You're not alone. Whether it's lifestyle choices, or care and treatment choices, their decisions have an impact on your company's health care costs.

With the summer season upon us, your and your employees' thoughts likely have turned to where you'll be spending your vacation time. Perhaps you enjoy lounging on the beach, soaking up the sun, while you bury yourself in a good book.

You've likely seen magazine ads, radio commercials and TV promoting miracle treatments for hair loss. Unfortunately, that is what's needed for those treatments to work - a miracle.

Browsing the Web could soon beat out baseball as the American pastime. Many of your employees use the Internet to research their health care options, their new diagnoses or their new diet. The problem is, there are thousands, if not millions, of health care websites.

For many of us who travel by plane, post-9/11 security restrictions have changed the way we prepare. Our packing has changed, our attire has changed and we now enter the airport hoping to make it through the screening, scanning and patting down with our humor intact.

Though primary care physicians and nurse practitioners are intended to be patients' first point of entry into the health care system, approximately seven out of 10 people in U.S. commercial health plans (and 95% of the elderly) see one or more specialists a year.

To ring in the new year, party like it's 1970! Since that year, January has been recognized as National Blood Donor Month. Being a blood donor saves lives - definitely not a shabby New Year's resolution, not to mention the free post-donation doughnut and cookies.

Thanksgiving now has come and gone, and the annual holiday season is in full swing. This time of year can be one of the best, but it can also be one of the most taxing on our bodies.