Patient Advocate Tips

This page contains patient advocate tips to improve the quality of your short and long term health care. Whilst this website is focused on care of a stroke patient, our tips are equally relevant to other patients.

• Maintain a "patient information central" as a central repository of information about the patient and their health care. This provides a central repository of all relevant information about the patient. Take this to each medical appointment as reference and to record the latest information.
  
• The patient advocate (and patient if possible) needs to be actively involved in health care decisions. This means not leaving it to the doctors to make decisions and not simply accepting what they say. Take the time to understand each proposal and what the alternatives are. Each decision should consider the risks of going with the proposal and compare these to the risks of other alternatives, including the "do nothing" alternative.
  
• Ensure that every doctor is aware of all medicines (prescription and over-the-counter) and dietary supplements (vitamins, minerals and herbs) that you are taking. Keep an up-to-date list of these, including dosages and instructions, that you can give to each doctor. It's also useful for the patient to keep this list in their wallet, in case of emergency.
  
  A useful tool is provided on Drugs.com  - here you can maintain a list of prescribed medicines, with details of each prescription. The system will automatically advise of any instances where the drugs may adversely affect each and you can subscribe to notifications about each drug. Make sure that you check these adverse impacts - we've been caught on several occasions where two drugs working together caused concerning symptoms. The system also prints you a neat full page and wallet-sized list of drugs.
  
• Make sure that you get a copy of each doctor's report and keep a copy in your patient information central. This will make it easier when you attend a new doctor for the first time. You should keep copies of all test results too.
  
• Record notes about each doctor visit. Ideally, this will start whilst in hospital, but sometimes this is impractical due to the timing of doctor visits - sometimes the patient advocate just can't be there. Record date and time, purpose of the visit, items discussed, tests required, diagnoses, actions agreed, etc. These can be in the form of notes which are kept in your patient information central.
  
• Key questions for each doctor visit are:
• What is the purpose of this visit?
• What is the diagnosis?
• What tests need to be done to confirm this?
• What treatments are recommended?
• What happens next?
• What symptoms require urgent attention?

Becoming a patient advocate is a significant commitment of time and effort. It's something that you're often not prepared for. We learnt the hard way just what this entailed. We've written Stroke Patient Advocate to share our learnings. If you're the care giver, family or friend of a stroke patient, this e-book can make the journey easier.