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NTH Winter Wrap Up
2023 has been an incredible year for NTH in terms of growth, connection and tangible impact on the healthcare landscape. We want to thank you for your generosity through attendance at our 2nd Saturday of the month meetings, financial support or sharing your unique skills to help us achieve so much! Check out what this year has brought and what we’re looking forward to in 2024!
Giving Campaign
Our first Giving Campaign was a great success, raising almost $2,000 to go towards our projects and operations for NTH! Your support means the world to us and will have a significant impact on providing critical healthcare access and education to those who need it most!
Once again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Your kindness is making a difference, and we are grateful to have you as part of our NTH family!
Funding Our Healthcare System: An Old Model Reimagined with John Silver and Beth Quaas
They discuss John’s Declaration of Independence for Nurses and why John felt it was critical to put it together. They also talk about Nurses Transforming Healthcare, and why it’s critical for nurses in this country to come together as a force to bring impactful change to policies of all sorts.
2023 Recap:
Increased social media presence by over 700% amongst Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn!
Regular 2nd Saturday open forums generating meaningful, critical conversations for change and improvement.
Subscribers to NTH increased 347%!
Established and sustained a thriving Adaptive Public Utility Model project in Spicewood, TX!
Presented the APUM at countless conferences, meetings, podcasts and speaking engagements which has led to incredible connections and networking!
A Patient Story
An 80-year-old man came to Helping Hands Food Bank in Spicewood, TX and is noticeably wheezing. Our nurse asks if she can speak with him and he shares that he was recently discharged from the hospital 3 weeks prior for acute emphysema and exacerbation of COPD. He said he thought he had to get his ‘papers’, a 32 page discharge packet he was given leaving the hospital and take to the VA hospital in Austin, TX. Due to transportation barriers, he was finding the journey to Austin a challenge.
Looking for a way to support him, the nurse asked if he had the papers and the client left slowly, wheezing to get them as he lived nearby. Upon his return, found buried in the instructions were life saving prescriptions for an albuterol inhaler and steroid taper. When asked why he didn’t get them filled, he was at first confused as to where he could get them filled and indicated that he didn’t have the $10.00 for gas to drive to the pharmacy.
How did we help this man? We provided him with a $10.00 gas card so he had access to get to the much needed medication he so desperately needed.
Imagine if we hadn’t been there to help him read through his discharge papers, find his prescription or took the time to listen to his needs. His anticipated readmission without medications and treatment could have led to another $12,000 in the local Emergency Room! All it took was a $10.00 gas card and the meaningful touch of a nurse, this is the Adaptive Public Utility Model at its finest!
This Incredible Journey
By Leanne Meier, BSN, RN
Nurses Transforming Healthcare has been an amazing journey and it is just getting more amazing! In 2020, I had the opportunity to use my International Talk Show for Nurses, Once a Nurse, Always a Nurse as a platform to broadcast the voices of nurses around the world. At its peak, there were 120,000 listeners in 70+ countries.
In the fall of 2020, I introduced several guest speakers to each other including Dr. John Silver, who created health model of the Adapted Public Utility Model (APUM), Kim Evans, APRN, with her out integrative medicine clinic for 25 years, and Kathleen Bartholomew, who is a National Health Culture Expert. The four of us realized the logic of John’s plan, we formed the non-profit, NursesTransformingHealthcare.org, and it has been growing ever since.
I have been a nurse for 50 years and I love Nursing and Nurses. I believe that few people REALLY understand the unique and intimate work nurses do with patients that leads to their healing. What I have seen, done and experienced from other nurses is almost spiritual. I believe that many more than just nurses feel this way about working with patients and making a tangible difference in their lives.
Our health industry has taken advantage of all of us, by creating such a hectic and dysfunctional environment, while allowing insurance companies to dictate to doctors and advanced practice nurses what they must do and what they can order for people. The outcome of decades of this is POOR health outcomes when compared around the world. Those of us who love the REAL work of healthcare can no longer do this work, which does not allow us to truly work with healing patients, and so leave the job and their professions.
We can stop this! We can turn this all around, by standing up together and just saying “No”! That is what NTH is doing! We invite people of all realms of healthcare to say YES to Primary care and prevention of illness. WE are creating chains of connections across the country and around the world, eager to WORK for the Healthcare we wish to work in.
Looking to the Future:
In 2024 we look forward to starting a new project in the New England area, sustaining our current projects and engaging with more of our worldwide friends of NTH! Several podcast appearances and speaking engagements are lined up for the year ahead and we can’t wait to share the excitement with you! Stay tuned and thank you for a great 2023!