Doctoral student interested in the intersection of social media and, well, everything. Mostly health. I also ride a bike and have really great friends.
Mine. All mine.
Once again, this Thanksgiving we are grateful to all the people who keep this mission alive day after day: to ensure that each and every one of us understands, communicates, and has honored their end of life wishes.
Seems almost more fitting than usual this year, the year of making change happen. 2011 gave us the Arab Spring, people on the ground using social media to organize a real political revolution. And now, love it or hate it - it's the Occupy Wall Street movement that's got people talking.
Smart people (like our good friend Susannah Fox) have made the point that unlike those political and economic movements, our mission isn't an issue we need to raise our fists about - it's an issue we have the luxury of being able to hold hands about.
It's a mission that's driven by all the personal stories we've heard of people who've seen their loved ones suffer unnecessarily at the end of their lives.
It's driven by that ripping-off-the-band-aid feeling of relief you get when you've finally broached the subject of end of life wishes with your family, free from the burden of just not knowing what they'd want for themselves, and knowing you could advocate for these wishes if your loved one weren't able to speak up for themselves.
And it's driven by knowing that this is a conversation that needs to happen early, and often. One of the greatest gifts you can give the ones you love is making sure you're all on the same page. In the words of the amazing Atul Gawande, you only die once! Die the way you want. Make sure your loved ones get that same gift. And there is a way to engage in this topic with grace!
Here are the five questions, read them, consider them, answer them (you can securely save your answers at the Engage with Grace site), share your answers with your loved ones. It doesn't matter what your answers are, it just matters that you know them for yourself, and for your loved ones. And they for you.
We all know the power of a group that decides to assemble. In fact, we recently spent an amazing couple days with the members of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, or C-TAC, working together to channel so much of the extraordinary work that organizations are already doing to improve the quality of care for our country's sickest and most vulnerable.
Noted journalist Eleanor Clift gave an amazing talk, finding a way to weave humor and joy into her telling of the story she shared in this Health Affairs article. She elegantly sums up (as only she can) the reason that we have this blog rally every year:
For too many physicians, that conversation is hard to have, and families, too, are reluctant to initiate a discussion about what Mom or Dad might want until they're in a crisis, which isn't the best time to make these kinds of decisions. Ideally, that conversation should begin at the kitchen table with family members, rather than in a doctor's office.
It's a conversation you need to have wherever and whenever you can, and the more people you can rope into it, the better! Make this conversation a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, there will be a right moment, you just might not realize how right it was until you begin the conversation.
This is a time to be inspired, informed - to tackle our challenges in real, substantive, and scalable ways. Participating in this blog rally is just one small, yet huge, way that we can each keep that fire burning in our bellies, long after the turkey dinner is gone.
Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season. Let's Engage with Grace together.
To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org.This post was developed by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team.
On Tuesday, Oct 4th, I'm leading a discussion at work on using Google Docs to create, collaborate, manage, and share documents of all kinds. This blog post was created specifically to show what a form looks like embedded in a web page. Feel free to fill it out, even though it doesn't mean anything. Consider it good karma points.
The Hubway, Boston's newly launched bicycle sharing system, has been a great addition to an already great city, and a success by most accounts. So successful, in fact, that the biggest complaint I hear is "when will they be installing a station near [name your neighborhood]" (more stations are being planned).
It's a great way to efficiently get from point A to point B, and - with all due respect to the MBTA - riding a bike is often a much faster way to get around downtown Boston than taking the T. And who wants to deal with parking a car?
Just this morning as I was riding into work (on my own bike), I passed by the Hubway racks at South Station and wondered if there was any discounts being offered to lower income folks who can't afford the $85 annual membership fee. My thoughts were apparently quite loud, as I just received an email from a friend at the Boston Public Health Commission alerting me to such discounts.
Please help spread the word by sharing the flyers included here, or by simply posting to your own organizations and networks. Help everyone share in the bike share love!
Google+ is out, and lots of people have their eyes on it, wondering if it will be the next Facebook. Having played around with it for the past week, I have some initial impressions to share.
Overall, I’m liking the layout and functionality of the platform. It’s clean, simple to navigate, and incorporates drag and drop functionality (something I’ve craved when making groups in Facebook). I was able to figure out the main elements of the interface within 10 minutes of clicking around.
More importantly, I’m liking the promise of ways I can apply it once it opens up to a wider audience.
There are four basic elements:
At this early stage I don’t have many connections, but I can already see the promise of this platform.
Most of the headlines are addressing the Facebook-Google challenge, but it seems to me that this comparison is a bit off. If anything, LinkedIn should be paying close attention – while they are an increasingly important resource for connecting professionally, the inability to sort people into groups and the busy layout makes it a bit easier to jump ship if something better came along. Plus, the ability to place people in circles (friends, family, professional connections, etc etc) allows for an easy segmenting of sharing information. It would be easy for me to post work-related material and share it only with that circle, or follow professional peers without having to officially connect (similar to Twitter). I can see this as a great way to see what others in my industry are talking about, and network more easily.
What Google+ doesn’t have at the moment is an easy way to store and sort documents. Combine Google Docs and Google+ and you have a serious challenger to tools such as Basecamp and Chatter.
Of course, any social network is only as good as the people that use it. That said, I am very excited to see what others think as the tool opens up!
There has been some news recently about iPhones tracking users wherever they go. To be honest, I'm not entirely surprised given the GPS capability of the phone. Still, this is sure to act as a good reminder to smartphone users that smart goes both ways.
Doctoral student interested in the intersection of social media and, well, everything. Mostly health. I also ride a bike and have really great friends.
Doctoral student interested in the intersection of social media and, well, everything. Mostly health. I also ride a bike and have really great friends.
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