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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How Hospital Television Impacts Acute Care Patients

January 30, 2015

There are many theories about how the violent television programs influence teenagers and adults — how they might desensitize us to horrific events. However, there is little discussion about the effect of violent

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Use of Music with People with Dementia: Doing the Obvious

January 23, 2015

So much research, and so little traction! That is what’s been happening with strong data supporting the effective use of music with people with dementia. There is even research that points to

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What’s the Price of Patient Safety?

January 16, 2015

Good news is great news when it comes to lives saved due to effective and consistent patient safety practices. Crediting financial incentives provided in the Affordable Care Act, the U.S.

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Joint Commission Opens Door for Guided Imagery

January 9, 2015

Happy New Year to new regulations and definitions! Effective January 1, the Joint Commission’s more comprehensive definition of pain management includes both pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic strategies — including physical, relaxation, and cognitive behavior therapies.

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Reader’s Choice: Top 10 Blog Posts in 2014

December 12, 2014

This past year, I wrote 43 blog posts about a variety of topics related to healthcare. Topics that resonated the most with readers were posts on patient experience, hospital noise,

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Patient Experience Knows No Holidays

December 5, 2014

Holidays are “the best of times and the worst of times.” The intensity of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s brings much joy to many and as much melancholy and sadness

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The ROI on Human Caring in Healthcare

November 21, 2014

Return on investment (ROI) is what we get for what we pay. Making “human caring” a commodity may seem crass, but, these days, if we look at supply and demand,

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The Environment of Care as Palliative Care

November 14, 2014

Florence Nightingale said that the environment of care holds within it the key to relieve both pain and suffering. And, the inverse is also true: it can exacerbate pain and suffering.

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The Waiting Room: Where Suffering Begins

November 7, 2014

In the waiting rooms of clinics, hospitals, emergency departments, urgent care clinics, humanity comes together as equal. And, for every minute that one waits, one also stops engaging in anything but

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Value of Loving Kindness in the Nurse-Patient Relationship

October 31, 2014

At the Beryl Institute Roundtable in Seattle, WA, this week, kindness dominated discussions about caregiver resilience in pursuit of the optimal patient experience. While the discussion started by looking at

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