Heart Disease in Women: Ladies, Love Your Heart All Year Long

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA Featured in USATODAY.com | Grand Rounds – Health Tips American Heart Month may be officially over, but don’t let the lack of media attention fool you into thinking heart disease isn’t a critical issue. We still need to be mindful of the fact that heart disease is the number one killer of women. There are simple lifestyle choices you can make to help prevent you from heart disease. I…

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The Patient, the Most Important Part of the Medical Team

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA (A follow-up post to “When Doctors and Nurses Work Together.”) Do you feel that patients are the most important part of the medical (health care team)? In a recent post on Healthin30, “When Doctors and Nurses Work Together” I wrote about the team-based approach for caring and treating patients, and it addressed the relationship between nurses, doctors, patients and the importance of a multidisciplinary, team-based approach to patient care….

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Rules of Patient Engagement: How to Deeply Connect with Empathy

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA In my recent post on KevinMD, “Deeply connect and engage your patients with empathy,” I write about how empathy is essential to help empower our patients. “It is with empathy that we can engage and empower our patients.” Doctors and nurses are leaders in health care. Being a great leader means having a clear vision, mission or goal.  It means being committed, and knowing how to listen and communicate,…

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When Doctors and Nurses Work Together

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA From KevinMD’s medical blog, in a recent post, Kevin Pho, MD answers the question, “Is the doctor-patient relationship really more sacrosanct than the nurse-patient relationship?” posed by Theresa Brown from the Well Blog, The New York Times Health Blog. The answer is “clearly no” writes Pho. Physicians have the ultimate responsibility for treatment decisions, but because nurses spend so much more time with hospital patients than doctors do, we…

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