Advice From Health Care’s Power Users

(Click on the image for Margot Sanger-Katz's New York Times report)

"If the health care system seems confusing to you, you are not alone. In a large recent survey of the most seriously ill people in America, we learned that they, too, find it difficult to navigate. But they have developed a few strategies for getting through. Here are some tips and pitfalls about how to be sick from a group with lived experience."

• Keep records and bring them
• Find an advocate
• Ask questions, and listen

"When asked about specific types of misunderstanding, 18 percent said advice by different medical professionals conflicted, and 15 percent said they couldn’t even understand what was being done to them. Twenty-two percent said that hospital staffers weren’t responsive to their needs.
Perhaps that’s why seven of the survey’s respondents also offered the following advice: Pray."