Patient advocate offers health-care tips in new book

Nova Scotia’s health-care system succeeds in many ways but one way it doesn’t is by failing to be patient-centred – that’s according to Mary Jane Hampton, a long-time healthcare planner and CBC Radio columnist.

In her new book, Health Hacks: How You Can Get Good Health Care in Nova Scotia (Formac Publishing Company), Hampton provides readers with a practical toolkit for dealing with health professionals and institutions and offers ideas on how the province’s healthcare system could work better for patients.

“To be an informed patient, to feel that you actually have some power in the process of obtaining health care, there are some things you need to know. There are some questions you need to ask every time, there are expectations you should have that should be upheld,” she said during a recent interview.

Hampton’s guide, which includes helpful forms and checklists, provides readers with 73 health hacks or tips ranging from gender bias in health care and being your own fiercest advocate to how to best explain your symptoms to your doctor. Hampton’s tips include: use your own words to describe your symptoms; don’t let your care provider put words in your mouth; be as descriptive as you can and include when you have your symptoms, how often and in what situations.

The majority of the tips in the book are in response to questions that friends and CBC listeners asked Hampton to explore in trying to navigate the healthcare system. In 2019, she began her weekly radio column on CBC’S Information Morning to offer suggestions and insights to help the public understand how the system works and ways to improve the patient experience.

“There is nothing in the Canadian healthcare system that is actually set up that would be intended to give the patient superb experience,” Hampton said.

“Every point of access should either solve your problem or give you a seamless step to the place where your problem can be solved. I doubt that is how most people would describe their experience through the health system.”

Hampton, whose father is a medical doctor, acknowledges that the healthcare system is struggling and is in the difficult process of reinventing itself. Despite its serious problems and inadequacies, she remains a passionate defender of a comprehensive and publicly funded healthcare system. She encourages readers to empower themselves instead of losing hope.

“If you get nothing else from this collection of tips and insider knowledge, I hope you learned this: you don’t have to be patient while being a patient. You have to be smart about how to get all the parts of a chaotic system working for you,” she writes. “In the meantime, if you’re sitting in a waiting room feeling scared, or anxious, or frustrated, or overwhelmed, look around you. Every clinician, every staff member, every volunteer you see came to work because they want to help people. We should all remember that.”