Kayoko Corbet

When Kayoko was young and healthy, she experienced a series of medical events that ended up altering the course of her life. Her experience of feeling helpless and scared led her to change careers to become a nurse so that she would never have to go through that experience again.

Luckily, nursing turns out her calling and she thoroughly enjoyed taking care of her patients and their families, especially advocating for them… until she got burned out. With the unrealistic workload, documentation requirements and poor technology etc, nurses don't get to spend enough time with the patients to maintain patient safety and care quality. The possibilities of adverse outcomes and human errors at medical facilities have been unacceptably high and the situation doesn’t seem to get any better anytime soon…

As Kayoko realized advocating for and helping patients achieve their best health has been her core passion, she switched sides and now happily works for the patients as an independent (private) patient advocate. Besides one-on-one advocacy work, she is passionate about educating the public about their role in improving patient safety and getting better value from healthcare.

• Board-certified patient advocate, Patient Advocacy Certification Board, 2018 to present
• BS in Nursing, Johns Hopkins University