From Health Policy to Bedside Nursing and Beyond featuring Adriane Carrier
Adriane Carrier is an advocate for social justice and health equality with a diverse background in healthcare. In this episode, we discuss her journey from activism during the HIV AIDS crisis in the 1980s to working as a registered nurse and eventually pivoting to becoming a private, independent patient advocate. Adriane highlights her experiences in dealing with healthcare policy, regulatory complaints, and safety standards, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. She emphasizes the importance of improving working conditions for healthcare workers to enhance patient care and safety. Adriane also touches on the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals and marginalized communities in healthcare and the need for health equity.
Adriane's broad expertise allows her to assist clients in various ways, such as providing clinical decision support, medical billing assistance, and navigating healthcare systems. She emphasizes the importance of understanding health insurance coverage and regulations, especially for those with elderly family members who may require healthcare support. Adriane's advocacy work extends to addressing violence in healthcare settings, an issue that often goes unreported, despite its direct impact on patient safety.
Transcript
Host
Adriane Carrier is a dedicated advocate for social justice and health equality with a long-standing commitment to making a difference in people's lives. During the HIV AIDS crisis in the 1980s, she was active in fighting for equal access to health care as a civil rights issue. As a campaign lead for the Human Rights Campaign and the community organizer for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, Adriane focused on LGBTQ and minority health issues, fundraising, and legislative work. Later, as part of the organizing staff of the service employees, international union, she contributed to historic union organizing efforts for healthcare workers in Southern California in the early two thousands. Adriane became an RN in Southern California where she provided care to mostly underserved populations while serving as a union steward during the COVID-19 pandemic. She worked as a director of education, health and safety for over 10,000 RNs. writing over 200 regulatory complaints related to safety standards and collaborated with Cal OSHA to write emergency COVID legislation. Adriane owns and operates trusted Guardian patient advocates, offering private concierge patient advocacy, health coaching, and clinical navigation, medical billing assistance, and family mediation services. She's a board member of Pulse, CPSCA. And she also recently launched a podcast, being the space, interviewing and discussing change makers, innovators, visionaries, and transformation. Adriane, thank you so much for being on the patient advocacy now podcast with a bio like yours and all the experience from legislation to being a nurse, to dealing with regulation and safety. You have a pretty big scope of understanding this space. Where, where do you decide to focus your energy? Because it seems like you kind of have had your hand in so many different pies.
Adriane Carrier
Yeah, welcome, John. Thank you. Yeah, I have a very good, big picture view of healthcare and public policy because of my own personal experiences, my professional experiences. And I mean, this is going back to when I was a teenager. So I was an activist at a very young age, thanks to my mom and just the community and the contacts. I mean, when, you know, things are happening in our environment. we always have the opportunity to step up, to show up, and to be engaged in change. Now, one thing that's really been different for me is, I went from this policy world to bedside, and then left that, went back to a much bigger role in policy and education, and had to pivot. And just to clarify, I got hired to be the director of education. And this was just prior to the pandemic, really getting going, you know, starting and lockdowns happening. And so the job I thought I was going to be doing, and then the job I ended up doing were completely different things. And I mean, I literally started the week of lockdowns. So everything I had planned and anticipated and was excited about for my role really went out the window and I had to shift. And so, you know, a lot of what we do in life is it's about do we successfully pivot and adapt. And I
Host
Well,
Adriane Carrier
think.
Host
tell me a little bit about the role that you had, what you thought it was gonna be, and then what it became. It's always interesting to hear that journey.
Adriane Carrier
Yeah, and again, this is about how the path, you know, sometimes you don't have control over the path and things happen and it is really more how you work around it. So yeah, I was hired to be director of education for 10,000 nurses, also a few hundred social workers, pharmacists, physical therapists, other healthcare professionals that were
Host
I guess
Adriane Carrier
represented.
Host
once you reach 10,000, they're like, hey, what's another few hundred, you know?
Adriane Carrier
Yeah, primarily a registered nurses union, but I did have to dabble in also learning about all these other professions and their professional requirements for licensing, et cetera, to offer classes. So I was prepared to do that and offer continuing education courses, classes on clinical skills, charting. I thought this is going to be great. I'm going to have fun. I love working with this huge area of Southern California. So it was different hospital systems, different types of nurses, some outpatient, inpatient. So anyways, I had this expectation, excitement, COVID hits. I had an idea COVID was coming. It wasn't really a surprise to me. I remember pulling my boss aside, my future employer aside, about a week before I started and I said, hey, there's something coming and it's going to be big. It's going to be really bad. There's going to be a lot of division in the public. We're going to have a lot of pushback from employers, hospitals. There aren't going to be any good players and we're going to lose members. And we're going to have to be prepared for that. Which, you know, none of those things could we be prepared for. Yeah, from a union perspective, you're used to fighting with the boss and having these battles over contracts and other issues. However, the level, magnitude, and the speed at which COVID came upon us as a society was completely overwhelming, and for everybody. And I will say that even some employers, they just didn't have a clue what to do. Even though there were already policies and regulations in place in California from 10 years prior, what we learned is that when you allow companies to self-regulate, it doesn't always work too well. And so the stockpiles that hospitals were supposed to have, they didn't have the procedures, all that didn't happen. So given my own experience working in public policy, I just immediately dove in and I became a content expert on airborne transmissible disease and just immediately went to CalOSHA, which is a great resource in California. It's our local version of OSHA and started just… contacting people and writing emails and reaching out to any name I could find that was in that division dealing with hospitals and healthcare. Because this will help people understand most governors provided kind of blanket immunity under the licensing agencies for healthcare facilities. So that meant all the patient protections that were in place were now gone. So there was no going to a licensing facility, like California Department of Health or whatever it may have been, and saying, hey, there's issues with patient care. There's, you know, there's XYZ happening. All of that was suspended. However, OSHA was not suspended, which protects workers. So for me, it was about how do we get this angle in that also protects patients as well as the workers, the employees. And that was really the ticket. It was going through OSHA, getting involved with them. They were very… excited to have me on board, have the presence of the union I work for, which is the largest union in America, and also to have a direct channel to workers on the ground and nurses on the ground who were dealing firsthand
Host
Thank
Adriane Carrier
prior
Host
you. Come
Adriane Carrier
to
Host
here,
Adriane Carrier
anything
Host
dear.
Adriane Carrier
really being publicized, prior
Host
All right. Bye.
Adriane Carrier
to us even seeing what was happening. We started to see New York, that was in the news a lot. We didn't really see a lot of what was happening in LA and Southern California. And so I was able to bring the voice and the experiences of all these nurses and healthcare workers back to Calocean say, here's what's going on in 20 different employers, right? Not just one employer, all of them. And it's very similar. Some are a little worse. Oh, some are suspending nurses. Some are firing nurses because they want to wear masks. They're actually making it, you know, a punishable offense. as an employee to wear a mask in the beginning, because there was a reaction of public relations to precedence over the safety and health of the public, patients and employees in a nutshell. And so when you start from that place, that's not the kind of place you want to start to when you're dealing with a public health crisis. You
Host
Yeah,
Adriane Carrier
know?
Host
especially at a hospital.
Adriane Carrier
Right, right. And so, I mean, we had doctors that were buying PPE for nurses in the ER. I mean, everybody who in healthcare, I mean, most, I would say most of us knew that this was an airborne issue. So we weren't really too worried about all the other types of transmission. For something to spread this fast, most of us knew it had to be airborne. And that meant having really specialized masks and 95s, which we know went in short supply. So. So it really became me going around to different people I knew and asking for donations and ordering masks from China. I mean, that was really one of the very first things I did was just to say, hey, can you give me $1,000? Can you give me $500? We need to order masks and get the Chinese version of an N95. And then I took these thousands and thousands of masks I had in my garage. and just started delivering them, driving around to hospitals, facilities, nurses homes, dropping off care packages saying, you know, here, wear this because, you know, again, nurses were being told here, wear one mask for five days, which you can't reuse an N95. You can't reuse a mask that's disposable, meant to be disposable. So there were just so many issues right at the beginning. So then I got very involved. Unfortunately, as I had said, you know, I knew I knew sadly we would lose members, we would lose nurses. That there, and you know, we know retrospectively, we lost thousands and thousands of healthcare workers, tens of thousands of healthcare workers, whose lives to this day still have not been really talked about or really they're not celebrated as heroes and really almost sacrificial lambs within a system that didn't want to address the crisis happening. And all of it was fairly preventable, which is also very sad. So we had a death of a nurse early on in April and in 2020. And from there, I had already made contacts. This was now a month and a half in to me working, right?
Host
Mm-hmm.
Adriane Carrier
Doing this role, having left bedside, I'm in contact with Osha. It was just something about this individual, what happened. She was in a code doing chest compressions directly. You're standing directly over a patient. They're… face is right there, so they're exhaling right into your face. You know, you're pushing their chest down, a lot of air is coming out. And so from that, it really gave me the impetus of, okay, we've got to use OSHA, and we've got to use the regulations we have, and publicity we can gather from the public and different communities to really bring about change and drive change. And again, I want to say some hospital systems were very… very cooperative, very welcoming of any help and support or guidelines that I could offer. And I wrote a lot of FAQs, fact sheets, guidelines for hospitals that I've just freely handed out. You know, we were like, here, we're all in this together. That was our approach. You know, we did not want to have an adversarial relationship with any employers or anyone because that was not going to save lives. Saving lives is about collaboration, teamwork, and let's all put our heads together. So there were definitely some systems who were very
Host
Okay.
Adriane Carrier
welcoming of that and relieved because they really had nothing. They didn't have the people power in place even to run the kind of programs that they needed to run to protect their employees or even get PPEs. And we were able to actually procure PPE mask from the governor's office, from the California stockpile for the hospitals where our members worked. So that was a huge. huge win for everybody because now we, you know, we're sitting on thousands of masks that we were now delivering directly to hospitals, hoping that they got to the right people, you know. So that was, that was a big change. So I started writing, I had already been very well versed in writing complaints to the Department of Health as far as the licensing issues when it came to patient safety. And so I just switched gears and figured out how to mass produce complaints against hospitals because One of the things that had happened is way back, and this is where these regulations came about in California, when H1N1 had come about, and I think this was about 2011, 2010, I was a rather new nurse, the problem with that was nobody filed complaints. So on the record, it looked like, great, these hospitals are doing great, everything's fine, everything went well. There were no problems at all. And I was working during that time and I was, you know, I remember Many of my colleagues remembered there were lots of problems. We didn't have enough PPE then, which is why the state created the standards they did, aerosol transmissible disease standards. So in my mind, I thought, okay, we've just got to generate a lot of complaints so that there are something on the record historically for this period of time, however long this is going to last.
Host
So moving from that COVID period to today, how did you kind of jump into the private advocacy space and what do you find yourself focusing on as an advocate? I think.
Adriane Carrier
Sure. So I took the exam to be a board certified patient advocate in 2018 when I was still working bedside. I really didn't know what I was going to do with it. I mean, all nurses are advocates. That's our training. It's, you know, we understand the ethics and all the bits and pieces of providing advocacy and fighting for our patients to get the best care. Fast forward, you know, went through COVID. COVID was still going on. I was frankly just emotionally drained. um, from working around the clock. And I knew that I needed to give myself a break. So I took some time off. I wanted to think about, okay, what is, what do I want to be doing? What really feeds me? And working with patients, I love patients. I didn't want to go back into a hospital at that point. And I thought, well, there's, I have this. Prudential and it looks like people are starting to create a business. out of being a private patient advocate. So I'm gonna give this a try. Then I ended up actually moving across countries. So, which was really a big shift for me. And it's been a challenge. I'm not gonna lie, when you move to a new place and you have no connections, I tell my friends, I said, I'm like a lab experiment. I've just dropped me in someplace where I know nobody, have no provider connections, doctor connections, hospital connections,
Host
Yeah,
Adriane Carrier
and
Host
where do you
Adriane Carrier
then
Host
move
Adriane Carrier
let's
Host
to?
Adriane Carrier
go. So I live in Virginia. I do provide services nationwide. I mean, really globally, frankly, because it's all remote at this point. So that was really, you know, I thought, I'm gonna do this entrepreneur thing. I'm gonna give myself the time and space to develop my company, which I still am. I mean, as anybody who's listening knows, when you're an entrepreneur, you're starting your own business, especially as a solo entrepreneur. You know, it can take years to really create the level of clientele. I mean, four or five years. where you are a sustainable business. And I think that's something I don't see other, a lot of advocates understanding because most advocates are not coming out of an entrepreneur business background. I mean, I'm still learning to understand it and saying, oh, I got to redo my whole website. Oh, I made that form terrible. This, what's my marketing? What's my branding? All of the bits and pieces, because you wear 25 hats as a solo business owner.
Host
Yeah, that's for sure. Do you find that you focus on specific services for LGBTQ individuals or for other marginalized communities as an advocate to make sure that they get the best possible healthcare experience because you've had your own experiences in that world yourself. So I'm kind of curious to see what you would focus on for those communities.
Adriane Carrier
Sure, I think right now, especially in the last couple of years, the healthcare needs of the LGBTQ communities, I'm going to say there's multiple communities because the intersections are huge, it has really become very challenging, especially in certain states. I mean, people are having to relocate. It already was an issue of equity and people being respectful. even in major metropolitan areas. I mean, I'm a native, you know, Angelino, and I've had my own experiences throughout my life dealing with homophobia within healthcare or bias. I saw it in my own hospital I worked in. I saw it from coworkers, unfortunately. And yeah, I think that
Host
Would
Adriane Carrier
just...
Host
you mind going through an example, either of your own life
Adriane Carrier
Sure.
Host
or one of your clients so that people who don't deal with it can hear what it sounds like or what it looks like?
Adriane Carrier
Sure. I think, you know, so here's just an example. Now I came out when I was pretty young. I was 13 when I came out. So, you know, I remember every single time I, and I was an athlete. I often was in the emergency room. I'm prone to be just in be injuring myself and be clumsy. You
Host
Right.
Adriane Carrier
know, the first thing they ask you in a doctor's appointment or emergency room, if you're female is, can you be pregnant? Are you pregnant? Is it possible to be pregnant? You know, They're asking reproductive questions, which is really an assumption of heterosexuality. Now, yes, I could be gay, a lesbian and still be pregnant. Absolutely, of course, right? However, it's just that assumption of starting off and not really asking or collecting the data of, who are your partners, what's going on. I think for women, there are some real specific issues, especially when you're doing your OBGYN appointments. Again, that's another area. you know, what kind of birth control are you using? Well, I'm using the best kind. I don't sleep with men, right? I mean, that was always my answer after about the age of 15. And, you know, again, my mother, I get my sarcasm from my mom. She was a New Yorker. You know, all the way to, oh, I'm not comfortable seeing you. I don't, you know, this is not my area of specialty from providers to just not wanting to really address the issues of that women might face, lesbians may face, gay men are gonna face a different issue, right? Men who have sex with men are gonna face different issues. And then if you're a person of color on top of that and or you're poor, then you've got all these different barriers and hoops and you really don't know who to trust. So I don't specialize in those populations, but I certainly have an inclusive practice and I'm pushing on other advocates to really… get more out there behind health equity because this is a big issue and it's not getting any better, unfortunately. We're going the wrong direction.
Host
As far as safety goes, you know, you talked a lot about that in the COVID protocols. Do you have any examples either pre or post COVID of things you've seen at a hospital or in a healthcare situation as an example of dangerous behavior and how, you know, you can step in and rectify that situation?
Adriane Carrier
Yeah,
Host
Yeah.
Adriane Carrier
I mean, on the macro level, one of the things, because of my background, that I really wanna drive home to everybody and other advocates and anybody in this healthcare space, is that when we improve the working conditions of healthcare workers, we improve patient care. We improve patient safety. And specifically on the clinical side, when hospitals for the last 10 years have been cutting nurses' aides, secretaries. RNs are now just doing everything. You know, as an RN, I was central supply. I was a secretary. I was answering the phone. I was answering the door. I was taking calls, talking to doctors that wanted to have information about patients that weren't mine because there was nobody else that would navigate this. And I was working in a state with ratios where we had, you know, a maximum number of patients. So I will say the biggest safety risk right now for patients besides lack of actual healthcare or lack of providers to see is patient loads for nurses. We have to have ratios for nurses. And I would say the second biggest thing is the rampant violence in healthcare that's happening that's not being addressed by state and federal legislators.
Host
Did you say violence?
Adriane Carrier
Violence, yes. So I mean, we've had shootings in hospitals and doctors' offices. There's been no less than two dozen healthcare workers. killed inside of hospitals or even doctors offices, doctors
Host
Yeah,
Adriane Carrier
themselves
Host
I haven't heard
Adriane Carrier
have been.
Host
of most of this. Wow.
Adriane Carrier
Yeah. So this has become, and this is an issue. I will say the hospital I worked out was on a campus, a square mile, for example. And we had two or three security guards on at any time. So if you can imagine like a football stadium and you've got, you know, multiple floors inside, plus you've got multiple parking lots all the way around. the facility and cameras that don't cover the whole area, that's insufficient. So part of it is hospitals have to get more security and really have better measures. I mean, we went from a period, 20 years ago, let's say, where we really controlled patient visitor access in hospitals to this obsession with patient satisfaction scores, age caps, and part of that was related to visiting hours. So then it flipped and it was like, oh, we're gonna have 24 hour visiting hours. There's no timeouts, no blackout times during shift change, which is a very dangerous time for visitors to come in. For patients, don't come visit your family member at shift change, don't do it. Because if you're asking the nurses what's going on, you're actually interrupting their ability to transfer information about your loved one so that their care is continued as it should be. So those are some of the issues I would say that are on the macro level. And many of us, so what most people don't know, nursing itself is the most dangerous job in America. Nurses experience the highest rate of workplace violence of any profession, and nurses have the highest rate of workplace injury of any profession. So when you marry those two together, you're basically just you know, you're taking your, you know, chances that eventually you're going to be a statistic of a violent act upon yourself or an injury in your job. And I've been
Host
Where
Adriane Carrier
both.
Host
is the violence come from? Cause I've never seen it for, I mean, I can imagine in the ER if, if when emotions are high, I can kind of see that, but this is, I'm kind of dumbstruck. I apologize that I haven't kind of jumped in sooner, but
Adriane Carrier
Mm-hmm.
Host
nobody's talking about this. Where does
Adriane Carrier
Nobody
Host
the violence
Adriane Carrier
is.
Host
come from? Yeah.
Adriane Carrier
Right, these are patients. So I mean, if you keep, again, if somebody comes in and they have a weapon into a hospital and they're getting aggravated with a nurse or a member of the staff or provider, that's a risk to patients too, right? I've had patients come out of their rooms and say, hey, do you need me to call the police? I've myself called the police. And this is kind of healthcare's dirty secret. They really bully. healthcare workers, especially nurses from reporting this. They don't want us to call the police, although we have every right to do so when we're threatened. And this is something that I had no issue with. I just told people, look, I will
Host
Why
Adriane Carrier
call the
Host
don't
Adriane Carrier
police.
Host
they want you to call the police?
Adriane Carrier
Because they don't want that reported on their, because if like, if I'm a hospital, right, and I'm in a community and the police have to come out to my hospital, even though I have security, the police are gonna start asking the operators of that hospital. Hey, you know what's going on in your facility?
Host
Right.
Adriane Carrier
So if you can imagine if
Host
They don't
Adriane Carrier
the grocery
Host
want to be put
Adriane Carrier
store
Host
under the microscope. They don't want the scrutiny.
Adriane Carrier
Right, and because with scrutiny then comes the opportunity for that to bleed over into public knowledge. So just imagine your grocery store, right? You know,
Host
It kills
Adriane Carrier
every day.
Host
business. At the end of the day, it's a bottom line issue.
Adriane Carrier
Right. So imagine you had, you know, if you had a fight breaking out in your grocery store every day and the police were there, the police are going to want to, you know, the police are paid by the taxpayers and they have their job to do in the public sector. They're not really expecting that they're going to have to come into a hospital that's turning a profit and has the full ability to hire their own security. And also they set their own… policies, right? So then it comes back, well, why do you have this 24 hour visiting policy? Why do you have unlimited number of visitors and you don't have waiting rooms on each floor?
Host
Right.
Adriane Carrier
Where are these people going to go in the hospital? They can't all fit in the room. And how do you keep track of all these people roaming through a hospital when you have 200, 400, 500 beds? Right? So if there's not, so the hospitals that do really well are the ones that, you know, take your photo when you come in, you sign in, you wear a badge, they're documenting, you know, you. coming in, but nothing's really gonna prevent somebody who wants to get in from getting in. I can tell you as a former union organizer of hospitals, there's not a hospital I ever found that I could not get in past security. Not a single one that I ever worked, was assigned to in the United States. And there's just so many avenues to get in, to get access in a hospital. There's so many entrances, especially when they're connected to a medical office building. So, you know, and then you've got
Host
See ya, later.
Adriane Carrier
your ER. The ER is, you know, become the mental health, you know, pit stop, right? This is where people are brought with mental health issues that aren't where they should actually be going to some kind of service where it's specifically addressing their needs or an ER that is, you know, specifically staffed for psychiatric care and most are not. So,
Host
Yeah.
Adriane Carrier
you know, you've got overflow happening in ER where you don't even have rooms. You've got patients sitting in the hallway. They're getting aggravated. People are being frustrated in the waiting room. You know, there's all kinds of things and these things can be mitigated to some degree by actually having more staff. So if you've got somebody who's out there in the waiting room, keeping an eye on things and able to alert security, if you have enough security and say, hey, you know, this person seems like they're getting a little aggravated. So maybe we need to address that. It's not always, you know, Sometimes just people need to be heard.
Host
Yeah.
Adriane Carrier
Sometimes they just need to be heard. But other times people are coming in and they know exactly what they intend to do. Other times it could be patients who are somewhat delirious, they're on medications, they don't really know what they're doing or there's just a lot of different things that can happen. Again, it's usually around mental health and drug use. often is where that happens.
Host
Your expertise is so vast and you've kind of been in so many different areas of healthcare. What does it look like for someone to work with you directly as a private advocate, as an independent advocate?
Adriane Carrier
Sure. Well, one thing about all of us, as I would say as private advocates, is that we're providing a very discreet service, right? My clients are, I will say, on the higher end of socioeconomic status. Most of our clients are because of our price point and because insurance doesn't cover our services. So, you know, that does kind of create a niche unto itself of who has access to us for the most part. At this time, I think that will change in the future. But it means, you know, we do an intake, we have a conversation. Who are you? Are you hiring me for yourself? Are you hiring me for a family member? Your mom, your dad, your aunt, who, you know, maybe is three thousand miles away, but you're the only living relative. Again, 20 percent of people in America are solo agers. Ten thousand people turn 65 every day. So the issue of, you know, I don't have anybody to who is making my health care decisions or I, you know, I'm. I'm in charge of somebody who I don't even know, right? And I'm in that population, you know? So one is first determining, are you the right person? Right, are you the person I should be speaking with? And is this an appropriate relationship to establish? How can I help you? Do you need clinical support? Which means, you know, I offer clinical decision support. Some advocates do just medical billing. I outsource that, I do medical billing, but I actually contract that out. There's a lot of niches within it because I have clinical expertise. That's what I lean into, as well as my knowledge of regulations. So if somebody's saying, well, my mom is in a nursing home or a skilled rehab and she broke her hip, I have to get the whole background story. Then I've got to look at their insurance. Most people do not know what their health insurance covers and they for sure have no clue what is covered by a loved one. That's a starting place.
Host
Yeah.
Adriane Carrier
So we do a full history. We start with the top. five or six things, which is, do you have an advanced directive? Do you have a medication list? Listing the names of the prescribers. And also one thing I ask people is, why do you think you're taking this medication? And how long have you been taking it? And are you actually
Host
I'm
Adriane Carrier
taking
Host
ready.
Adriane Carrier
it? Because people will list
Host
Cool.
Adriane Carrier
their medications, but some of them they're not taking, or maybe they take them seasonally. Do you have a list of all your providers and physicians? Do you understand what each of them is doing for you? Is there any overlap? We look at those lists. And then who's your healthcare proxy? Who's the person making decisions for you? Who else do you want to share information? And then we do some HIPAA releases that we sign. So I have access to their healthcare records. Not everybody
Host
Bye, everybody.
Adriane Carrier
even gives access. Some people just want the consultation
Host
Right.
Adriane Carrier
and they want that decision support. So.
Host
So it sounds like step one is you make sense of what's going on. That's
Adriane Carrier
Right.
Host
kind of the first thing.
Adriane Carrier
It's really case management, to be honest. I mean, what we are private case managers to some degree, because we're connecting the health insurance, the providers, the hospitals, the facilities, the services available. Somebody might live in one of these states on the northern part of America where there isn't even a level one trauma center and you've got to go to Colorado if you're in Montana or something, right? And so it's important to let people know. Do you know what hospital to go to? Do you know how far away is it? Do you know what level of care that they can provide? Because sometimes people are gonna say, well, my mom, my dad, my brother, sister, they got transferred 500 miles away. They got airlifted because they were a burn, they received burns and there was no burn unit close by. So I help people make sense of things and just simplify what's actually going on because most people are gonna say, yeah, I take an orange pill, I take a purple pill. I take this yellow pill and then you find out, oh, they're taking three medications that do exactly the same thing. So let's just make a relationship with the doctors, the providers, nurse practitioners, PAs, and coordinate all the medications first off. And let's make sure that you know what all of your diagnoses are and that those are also accurate. So the other thing that I do is I immediately connect with the providers for my clients. and let them know, hey, I'm in partnership with you. This is not an adversarial relationship. I'm helping you because I'm gonna reinforce the education. I'm gonna reinforce the care plan. I'm gonna reinforce what you want this patient to be doing. And then we're gonna figure out the follow-up because the other part is people don't do follow-up appointments. Come back and see me every two months or whatever it might be. So doctors and providers are usually very eager to work with us because they know then they're gonna have a more compliant patient. They're gonna have better outcomes. They want that too.
Host
Right. Well, what's the best way is the best way for someone to reach out and work with you? Just kind of going through your website. Yeah.
Adriane Carrier
Yeah, that's the best way to reach me is go to my website, my phone number is on there, my email is on there, info at tgpatients.advocates.com.
Host
the website just one, one more time, a little slower is TG patient advocates.com. Right. T like
Adriane Carrier
Yeah.
Host
Tom G like good. Right.
Adriane Carrier
And you can find me also, I'm on LinkedIn, nurseadrianrn is my contact on all the socials. And so I'm on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. And you know,
Host
Thank you.
Adriane Carrier
I see that this field is going to really start progressing and opening up. And we're going to just keep seeing more niching in people really
Host
Mhm.
Adriane Carrier
getting into specialties. We're seeing a lot of pharmacists come in now, which is great. So that's been really exciting because now we have them as a resource. So people are looking to see, Hey, how can I make a change, stay in healthcare and, you know, make a difference and still make a living.
Host
It's absolutely fantastic to talk to you and get your wealth of knowledge and experience. It was super informative. I mean, I had never really heard of the violence piece in hospitals and now I kind of have some research to do. So, uh, thanks for the homework.
Adriane Carrier
Yeah.
Host
And, uh, and I appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Adrian.
Adriane Carrier
Thank you so much, John, appreciate it.
Host
Okay. I stopped.
