Dr. Michelle Nelson Mammogram Story

I am a nurse practitioner, a family nurse practitioner from Brooklyn, New York. 

A patient that one of my colleagues was seeing. She had come for a mammogram, and the mammogram showed that there was something funny in the imaging. And because of the time in which she came, there was no physician there to be able to order the advanced imaging that was necessary to be able to confirm whether or not there was some type of a lesion or some cancer. And because of that, she just happened to come at the wrong time. There was a delay in care. So by the time the doctor ordered it, you know, she wasn't able to come back and there was a delay, months delay, by the time she was able to come back. And by the time she came back, the cancer had spread from like a stage two to a stage four very, very rapidly. Now why should anybody be faced with a situation like that when you have an advanced practice nurse on site.

The only person that's getting hurt when you hear stories like this is the patient. Delay in care, additional funds that they may not even have that have to be spent, these expenditures in terms of time. And your health can be detrimental. And we have to approach healthcare in a completely different way.