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 Interview with Author Craig B. Garner
1. What excites you most about your book’s topic? Why did you choose it? As a hospital administrator, I realized how lost most people were – irrespective of sex, race, wealth, or age – when they unexpectedly found themselves sick in a hospital. Hospital patients should not be made to feel helpless. At the same time, they should not attempt to empower themselves by believing everything they read on the Internet. The patient must strike a balance between reckless self-diagnosis and feeling utterly lost in a hospital setting. I hope my book will provide answers on a number of topics so that the reader can better understand his or her situation.
2. How long did the book take you from start to finish?
All told, this book took nearly a year. My background is in law and administration, but my colleagues are medical doctors. Together, we passed ideas around, wrote and rewrote, and then edited each chapter so that it included the point of view of the physician, the patient, and hospital administration. To do this in such a way as to make everything understandable to all took some time.
3. What aspect of writing the book did you find particularly challenging? Again, writing a technical book designed to inform the general public was a daunting task. The tone of the book needed to be accessible to everyone, from young patients to old, with varying degrees of education and health care experience. To do this while incorporating medical, legal, ethical, and insurance related issues proved quite challenging, to say the least. I hope we accomplished what we set out to do, which was to show hospitals in such a light that they are no longer so intimidating.
4. What surprised you the most about the book writing process?
Once the general idea was decided upon, I was impressed by the way the book just unfolded before me, and how certain chapters led unexpectedly to previously unforeseen ideas for new chapters.
5. Did you have any favorite experiences when writing your book? Overall, the process was fun. But connecting with health care professionals on a higher level was very rewarding.
6. What do you hope your readers will gain from reading your book? Perspective and peace of mind. I would like my readers to have a firm grasp on what awaits them as they enter a hospital, so that they are mentally prepared for what is to come. I also hope this book will help patients and their families during the many hours of waiting by answering some of their questions and putting them at ease when a doctor is not available to do so. When one is focused on reading, he or she has no time to worry.
7. What projects are you currently working on? Through a non-profit foundation I started (Not So Much Foundation, www.NotSoMuch.org), I am currently working on a project called “Local Hospital” (www.LocalHospital.org). Local Hospital is a free resource designed to teach local communities about their nearby health care services. It identifies the hospitals in a community and the medical services each facility provides. There is also information pertaining to the health care system in an effort to help individuals be more prepared for their next hospital visit.
I am also starting a new book project about the state of community hospitals in the United States.
8. Is writing your sole career? If not, what else do you do? I am currently the Chief Executive Officer of a community hospital located in Los Angeles County, California. Prior to this I practiced law as an attorney and partner specializing in health care issues. I am also the founder of Not So Much Foundation (www.NotSoMuch.org), a charitable organization that focuses on the promotion of education and public awareness in the area of individual and global sustainability.
9. Did you do any research for your books, or did you write from experience? Oh yes, of course I did. This book is intended to break down a variety of complex subjects relating to health care, including the specific role of every employee to be found in a hospital setting, the necessity and uses for cutting edge procedures, and the inner workings of state-of-the-art technical equipment. Research was essential in reducing each topic into a set of its least common denominators.
10. How did you come up with your title? I broke down the subject into its simplest form. The title was the easy part.
11. What books have influenced you the most? My inspiration to write this book came in part from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, a novel published in 1968 and set in a Soviet hospital circa 1955. Five decades later, medicine still faces similar issues, not just in a 1950’s Soviet era hospital but throughout the entire United States. Let’s face it, when someone is sick, they just want to get better. It helps tremendously if they don’t have to wait, too.
12. Who was your publisher and why did you choose them? Lulu.
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