How we get better

AMERICANS ARE EMERGING FROM THE COVID-19 pandemic like survivors of a wildfire surveying an unfamiliar landscape. As we take stock of what’s left, we are forced to rebuild, but we need not simply restore what was taken in a hollow echo of what we knew before. We can make health care and the infrastructure that supports it better, stronger, more resilient. To do that, as we learned at great cost over the past 15 months, we must value all the stakeholders in the system: not just insurance executives and hospital CEOs, but patients, disabled people, older adults, low-income people, people of color who have faced historic health care discrimination, and health care workers and supporters, from home health aides to hospital registrars.

NURSES REMINDED THE HEALTH CARE COMMUNITY THAT PATIENT CARE ISN’T JUST ABOUT PHYSICAL HEALTH

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