Susan E. Mazer, Ph.D. Blog

Thoughts and ideas on healthcare

Hi, and welcome to my blog! I'm Susan E. Mazer -- a knowledge expert and thought leader on how the environment of care impacts the patient experience. Topics I write about include safety, satisfaction, hospital noise, nursing, care at the bedside, and much more.

Impressive Outcomes for Geriatric Emergency Department

January 29, 2016

Going to the Emergency Department is frightening enough, but even more so if you’re a frail senior who is exposed to people who’ve ended up there as a result of gunshots or drug

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Encore Post: 5 Ways to Improve the Hospital Waiting Room Experience

January 22, 2016

No new post this week, but enjoy the encore post — one of my most-read in 2015! Waiting is not good in the American culture. If we were Buddhists, we might

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5 Ways to Optimize the AHRQ Teach-Back Technique

January 8, 2016

Are you using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Teach-Back technique of asking patients to repeat what they have been told and/or explain their understanding of their condition?

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The Pandemic of Violence: A Health Issue

December 4, 2015

The kind of trauma that we have watched just in the last month, beginning with Paris, then Mali, California, Georgia, and others — is no longer uncommon. Our communities and

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The Role of Television After a Terror Attack: Good for Patients?

November 17, 2015

On 9/11, administrators at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado, which cares for spinal cord and traumatic brain injury patients, quickly realized that continuous television broadcasting of the fall of the twin

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Discharge: Re-entry Into the Afterlife of the Patient Experience

November 6, 2015

Re-entry into life after hospitalization has been reduced to the term “discharge.” Healthcare professionals have also limited their responsibility for patients once they leave the hospital to a list of instructions

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What’s the Role of the Environment in the Patient Experience? Guest Post by Sara Marberry

October 30, 2015

The design of the healthcare environment is under attack again — this time by a couple of academics that studied whether improving the patient experience has any impact on readmission rates. In

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Music to My Ears – Guest Post by Wendy Leebov, Ed.D.

October 23, 2015

At 97, my mother has partial dementia. A few weeks ago, she was admitted to the hospital because she had what looked like, but proved not to be a stroke.

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Encore Post: ICU-Acquired Weakness – Powerlessness in Recovery

September 25, 2015

Note: A busy week, so no new post, but enjoy this encore of one of my most-read posts from 2014. Recently, The New England Journal of Medicine published an article about ICU-acquired weakness. The

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What Medication Cannot Do for Patient Pain and Suffering

September 18, 2015

“Do you hurt?” asks the bear to the mouse. “No. Not body hurt. But, my fear hurts,” says the mouse. “Does fear bleed?” asks the bear. “Yea…but the blood of

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