How Healthcare Works, LLC

After months, actually make that years, of walking every day and challenging myself, I finally registered for a race. I was happy to have registered at least. That's the first step to any goal is to decide to do it. As race day started getting closer and the forecast looked stormy, I thought to myself, "I might not do the race. I might have to stay home." A few minutes of introspection, and I told myself I had to do it. If the race was going on, I had to be there. I owed it to myself. I wasn't going to be "that person" who says she is going to do something and then never does. I woke up early the morning of the race. Technically, my dog woke me up at 5:00 am because he had to do his business in the yard. I woke up, pulled my hair back, and let my rat terrier and my pomchi out into the yard. Even in the early morning, they were running and playing. When they came back in, I went back to bed for a few minutes. At 5:45 my alarm went off. I was excited, my hea

In one of my former roles, one of my duties was to collect sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) lab findings, determine if the treatment had been given, notify the patient if the treatment had not been given,  and report the findings and data to the health department. I also provided data management and training support to the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE) program at a Level I Trauma Center. The specific training support I provided was for STDs. When a person is sexually assaulted, the perpetrator is highly unlikely to have any care or concern about the health and well-being of the victim. The perpetrator is not going to tell the victim, "Can you hold on a second, while I put on a condom?" Instead, whatever possible STD the assailant has, the victim is at risk of contracting. STDs transmission is a hidden epidemic since it is often a taboo topic discussed. The top reported infectious diseases in the United States today are chlamydia and gonorrhea - both STDs. A

One of the first big papers we were assigned in my healthcare management course in graduate school was the evaluation of whether management was an art or a science. Of course, management is both an art and a science, and managers are artists and scientists and social scientists and philosophers and educators. Management is not one-dimensional. As such, managers themselves are not one-dimensional, either. Years after I had finished my graduate program, I learned that the professor who had assigned the paper was himself an artist - a painter. Although I wrote as a hobby, I never considered myself that creative. Several members of my own family were artists, but drawing was not in my DNA. I created pictures with words and wrote "stories" as my family called, although my writing really fell more into the realm of descriptive narratives and poetry. Last year, I decided I was going to read more. I had always enjoyed reading, and I felt like I was falling behind in the popular l

This week's post is a little late. I wanted to wait for the end of the Billion Steps Challenge and National Public Health Week so I could see how we ended up with the challenge. If you have been following along with the walking goals from Week 1, you will know that we started off with 1,000 steps a day for five days a week. Each week, we incrementally increased those goals by 1,000 steps. Finally, this past week, we reached 14,000 steps. I must admit, however, that I did hit 15,000 steps this week, simply because of the path I take while walking. As a result, the HHWWalkers, ended up number 56 out of 350 teams. That means we performed in the top 16% of walking teams, just by incrementally increasing our steps every week by 1,000 steps. Now that the Billion Steps Challenge is over, the real challenge begins. That challenge is to keep on walking. Over the past several months, we have walked in the cold, in the rain, in the sunshine, in the wind. We have walked in living rooms, base

One of the most important lessons I learned early in my healthcare administration career was the importance of continuing to move forward even in a time of crisis. Even when times are tough and a crisis has to be addressed and everything seems like it is temporarily halted and frozen in space and time, operations must keep moving forward. Saying, "Okay, everyone stop where you are, so we can deal with this problem," just isn't an option. The thought of moving forward in crisis has been on my mind the past few weeks as the situation in Nebraska unfolds. Emergency needs have arisen for livestock, for livelihoods, for schools, for water, for safety, for health. Individuals, communities and civic organizations are responding in reaction mode to get the state of Nebraska up and running again. Still, for those individuals involved, each day has to be a step forward. They still must go about the daily business of their lives and even the daily business of business. We someti

As I thought about this week's 12,000 steps and all that is happening in the Midwest right now, the song, "Walking in Memphis," kept coming to mind. The song is about the writer's stroll through Memphis as he greets the ghosts of the past who paved the way before him. As I walked this week, I thought of my own ghosts of the past as I walked through Nebraska. Only my thoughts were there in a different way. I thought about all the hours I spent nearly every day walking in Nebraska. When I lived in central Nebraska, I lived along a trail that was built above a canal. I can still see the still water laying maybe a few inches deep in the bottom of the canal. I can see the blue firefly riding along on my shoelaces, and feel the breeze of the trees by the lake where I first used a paddle boat. I can hear my friends from the hospital where I worked laughing as we met early on Saturday mornings at my place to go running/walking along the trail and then have coffee. I can see

I was awakened the other night by howling winds in our area. My dog was frightened and woke me up. I told myself it was nothing, I had lived in Nebraska, and I had been through windier days than this one. Little did I know that very night, Nebraska, my former home, was being hit hard with a devastating blizzard, referred to as a "bomb cyclone," and was experiencing road closures, freezing, and flooding of disastrous proportions across the state. As I saw pictures coming in across social media and from friends, I was saddened by the destruction and devastation that was sweeping across the great state of Nebraska. It's difficult to see towns I had visited with friends or roads I took to work, or even highways I'm sure I drove on...destroyed, underwater, and chunks of ice lying in pastures where cattle were supposed to be grazing. Instead, cattle were running for their lives, as ranchers struggled to round up cattle that were the very essence of their livelihoods. Wh