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2016 State of Patient Advocacy and the Alliance of Professional Health Advocates
Greetings in this new year 2016! I invite you to sit back, and picture yourself in that audience above as I provide you with a status report of sorts on the growth of the profession of patient advocacy as seen through the “eyes” of the AdvoConnection Directory, plus statistics from The Alliance of Professional Health Advocates, and how APHA plans to double down on support for the profession of health and patient advocacy during this coming year. The state of patient advocacy is: growing – but not fast enough! Just take a look at these statistics from the past three years. They reflect visitors to the AdvoConnection Directory – people looking for a patient advocate to help them. They are totals for visits to the entire site. We’ve come a long way since our first full directory year of 2010! People Looking for a Professional Patient Advocate Searchers(patients and caregivers) Sessions Pageviews 2015 47,082 59,950 229,780 2014 35,836 45,088 155,110 2013 30,736 38,612 99,395 …2010… 6,592 9,157 25,448 Of course, these numbers reflect the NEED for advocates. And that measures only the people who know patient advocates exist and then go looking for one to help. The flip side is, of course, how many advocates there are available to fill those needs. And while those numbers are also growing quickly, they are not growing quickly enough. Here are a few statistics about the number of advocates available, measuring by the numbers of advocates who belong to The Alliance of Professional Health Advocates, and those who populate the directory: Members of The Alliance of Professional Health Advocates as of December 31 Total APHAMembers Total Directory-Listed Members 2015 612 230 2014 509 154 2013 457 123 So what does this tell us about the status of professional advocacy? Let’s do a little math: Bottom line? We need MORE advocates! We need YOU! (Next week I’ll be writing more about this problem of not enough advocates, so stay tuned, and signup at right to be notified if you want a reminder when it is published.) There are additional challenges we…