Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

I'm an e-patient: equipped, enabled, empowered, engaged. I'm no clinician, but I do everything in my power to help them, to play an active role in my own care, and even in the design of care.

Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

We tend not to use the biggest resource in healthcare - the patients themselves. So I'm trying to figure out possible uses for digital technologies like Facebook but also real-life social networks to improve healthcare provision.

There's a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, 'We give them the service and they are grateful.' We have to move to shared decision-making.

I advocate for a totally new view of the role of the patient: patient as engaged partner, not passive recipient.

The consumer is really underutilized in health care.

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role ... in fixing health care.

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.

I want to be clear: not all patient communities are great, any more than online communities of any sort. But when a good one gets going, boy is it sweet.

An educated patient is empowered; thus, more likely to become healthy.

If doctors just spent more time with their patients so they felt more reassured, that might help.

Have a hand in your own treatment. I have nothing but praise for our doctors, but I think they could help us better, and we can help them if we work together.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

As patients and consumers, we are better informed today about our health care than any previous generation.

Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.

Communication is everything, especially as a doctor, you need to communicate with your patients.

It costs you just as much to ask a doctor 50 questions as it does to ask him one question. So go see your doctor with questions written down... And if he doesn't want to answer your 50 questions, go find yourself another doctor!

We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.

Most people assume that physician language is akin to technical, non-understandable jargon. It does not have to be that way. Doctors do not perform witchcraft. They simply interpret what they are told and what tests reveal. They diagnose and prescribe treatment. Our responsibility is to help doctors know what is going on in our bodies and to insist on clear, precise, understandable language in response.

Patients have the right to help themselves.

I always think, medically... you really have to be your advocate. You have to be able to back up everything that you're feeling with some information and protect yourself through the world of hospitals and doctors' offices, so the more information the better.

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.