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.

LATEST POST

4 Ways to Practice Environmental Compassion

September 18, 2025

Environmental compassion starts with a simple promise: notice everything that affects a person’s senses, then design it to help them heal. It means being intentional about sound, light, visuals, temperature, touchpoints, and timing

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Nothing But Words: Does HCAHPS Truly Measure the Patient Experience?

June 24, 2016

Contrary to what some might think, the patient experience movement wasn’t inspired by just one event or just one speech. It has a history, a kind of genealogy. From Wikipedia: “The word

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To Follow or Not: The Rules About Patient Safety

June 17, 2016

For the very first time ever, I was called for jury duty last week in the 2nd District Court in Washoe County, Nevada. I tried to think of some great

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Waiting, Waiting, and More Waiting: Is This Quality Care?

June 10, 2016

The more we wait, the more we hate waiting. And, when we are not feeling well or with a family member in the ED, waiting reaches the highest point of frustration. I have written this

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New Financial Motivation for Investing in the Patient Experience

May 20, 2016

The push to improve the patient experience was given financial teeth several years ago when HCAHPS scores were linked to reimbursements. The message was: Do poorly and be fined by penalties. Not necessarily

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The Sacred Work of Nurses is Done Everyday, Everywhere

May 6, 2016

“A nurse is anyone who is entrusted with the health of another.” Florence Nightingale wrote this at a time when the act of nursing was done by domestic labor, religious women,

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Which Week Isn’t Patient Experience Week?

April 29, 2016

This is Patient Experience Week, but which week is not about the patient experience? During which week does a single patient matter less in what we do? Since the early

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The Age of the Patient Experience: When Do We Get Good At This?

April 22, 2016

Coming from the 2016 Beryl Institute Patient Experience Conference last week, like the 1000+ attendees, I’m both inspired and driven to move this whole discussion deeper. Not unlike how Descartes split

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Want to Improve the Patient Experience? Pay More Attention to the Room

April 7, 2016

Lists, surveys, multiple-choice HCAHPS questions, and operational manuals – the healthcare industry is trying to define and control the patient experience generically. Would we try to define any other human

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The Patient Experience: When We Accept the Unacceptable

March 25, 2016

My mother hated the word tolerance, especially when it came to race. She would say, “To tolerate is not to respect. It is ‘to put up with.’” I am in

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Bhutan: Universal Healthcare and Gross National Happiness

March 22, 2016

Is healthcare (1) a human right, (2) a privilege, (3) a commodity, (4) a luxury, (5) a public utility, (6) a targeted market, (7) a service industry? Is a sick

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