Patient Advocate in Marana

Marana, Pima County, Arizona

Nurse advocacy for Marana patients and families

Marana, northwest of Tucson, has grown quickly, and much of that growth is working-age families. The advocacy need here often looks different from the retirement communities further south: it is the sandwich generation — people holding down a job and raising children while trying to manage a parent's healthcare, sometimes a parent who lives elsewhere entirely.

That situation has a particular failure mode. You cannot take a weekday morning off for every appointment. You are getting the medical picture secondhand, from a parent who did not fully follow what the specialist said, or from a sibling who caught a different half of it. Decisions get made in rooms you were not in. When a hospitalization arrives, you are trying to assemble years of medical history over the phone while someone waits on the other end of the line.

Amy DuBois, RN, BCPA, absorbs that load. She attends the appointments, asks the questions that need asking, and sends a written summary afterward followed by a call. If your parent is admitted, she informs the hospital-based medical team of the health, medication and treatment histories rather than leaving that to be reconstructed, follows the progress of the stay, and helps manage the transition home so a readmission is less likely.

For families splitting care between Marana and Tucson — where most specialist appointments happen — Amy also handles the coordination between them: obtaining records, building a single medical summary, and making sure every physician involved has current information rather than their own fragment of it.

Amy meets Marana clients at home, at northwest-area medical offices, and at the Tucson hospitals and specialists where much of the care takes place.