These four multi-disciplinary studies focus on sexual and reproductive health advocacy and programs in Latin America. Based on original research and the author's 25 years of experience working in the region, the text illuminates the political, cultural, and organizational dynamics that pose an obstacle course to sexual and reproductive health--dynamics that veterans of the "culture wars" in many other regions of the world will recognize. One groundbreaking study of advocacy in Colombia and Chile for the legalization of abortion and divorce discusses the "double discourse" system that keeps repressive laws in place and punishes public opposition to political norms that are based on religious doctrine. Another study of Latin American NGO regional and national advocacy networks examines the roots of difficulties they experience in unified decision making, often resulting in failure to take decisive political action. The book then offers two program case studies--one in Peru and one in Chile--focusing on issues of citizen participation and respect for rights in health systems and in schools. The Peruvian study brings to life a four-city experiment to foster community participation of women's organizations in health services. The Chilean study focuses on a highly participatory and successful sex education program in public schools and the ways in which political controversies affected the program, eventually contributing to its demise. The book's holistic approach, written from the point of view of an outsider/participant, makes a unique contribution to the study of social change in general, and to worldwide efforts to mainstream human rights, social justice, and gender equality in sexualand reproductive health programs and policies.

Dr Alison Talbot-Smith, an experienced doctor and researcher, and Professor Allyson M. Pollock, one of the UKs leading authorities on the NHS, give a lucid and incisive account of the new NHS - which has emerged from a far-reaching programme of market-oriented changes. Providing an authoritative and accessible overview of the new NHS, the book describes: the structures and functions of the new organizations in each of the devolved countries the funding of NHS services, education, training and research and resource allocation the regulation of the new NHS systems and workforce the relationships between the NHS, the Department of Health, local authorities and regulatory bodies, and between the NHS and the private sector the future implications of current policies. This is an indispensable resource for those working in healthcare today as clinicians, academics, researchers and managers. It will also be essential reading for academics, students, and researchers in related fields, as well as the general public.

How do doctors and nurses communicate with frightened patients who are dying, address the needs and concerns of the patients, and help the patients arrive at an acceptance of death? This work deals with the relationship that the health care team has with the dying and how well that team is prepared to address the fears of the dying. In addition, the health care team must learn to deal with their own emotions and ignorance concerning death. This work should be of interest to those professions that deal closely with dying people.

Self-Supervision synthesizes past and current literature on the theory and practice of self-supervision and provides counselors and human service professionals with a plan for the pursuit of independent professional growth. Beginning with a historical overview and discussion of the counselor-client relationship, boundary transgressions, the counselor's family-of-origin and unresolved issues, and disclosure styles, the author provides the reader with a foundation for understanding the issues that must be examined when evaluating one's own work. He then outlines the reflective process and describes the actual practice, guiding principles, and strategies for self-supervision. Finally the author presents several proactive measures for counselor self-care that readers will find useful.

On investigative visits to nursing homes across the nation, Beth Baker has witnessed profound changes. Culture change leaders are tearing up everything -- the floor plans, the flow charts, the schedules, the lousy menus, the attitudes, the rules -- and starting from scratch. They are creating extraordinary places where people live in dignity and greet the day with contentment, assisted by employees who feel valued and appreciated. Perhaps most surprising, these homes prove that a high quality of life does not have to cost more. Some of the best homes in the nation serve primarily low-income people who are on Medicaid. In this new book, Baker tell the story of a better way to live in old age. Although each home is different, they share common values: respecting individual choices; empowering staff; fostering a strong community of elders, staff, family members, and volunteers; redesigning buildings from a hospital model to a home (where pets and children are part of everyday life); and honoring people when they die. Her visits to more than two dozen facilities include those associatd with the Eden Alternative, Green House, Kendal, and the Pioneer Network. Whether these transformational homes become the norm or the domain of a lucky few is the question that faces the next generation of elders, the baby boomers.

Even if constrained in their international choices, recipient countries of global health programmes hold the capacity to autonomously define and pursue their own strategies, policies, and ultimately attain political goals. This is comparatively demonstrated through the analysis of PEPFAR's implementation in Botswana, Ethiopia and South Africa.

Examines the diverse uses and abuses of risk by social actors across a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and geographical locales. The introductory chapter by the two co-editors analyzes and contextualizes current scholarly debates on the social, cultural, and political construction of risk. It is followed by an overview on the anthropology of harm reduction that outlines an innovative framework for culturally informed risk analysis. The remaining nine chapters are organized into three sections, The Cultivation of Fear, Perceptions of Health, Safety, and Hazard: Risk Makers and Risk Takers, and Regulating Risk and the Public's Health. The book aims to address a set of questions of theoretical and practical importance to anthropologists, sociologists, public health scholars and professionals, and public policy advocates, among others. These questions include: How do individuals conceptualize and respond to risk? Can risk be a tool of empowerment for individuals and communities who define themselves as at-risk? How has risk figured recently in the production of health inequality? Has the social contract to provide care in its broadest sense expanded or contracted around issues of risk? Are risk and the imperative to adhere to risk warnings used by experts as a means of social control?

The volume's contributors, medical anthropologists and sociologists, provide rich, grounded ethnographic case material on the processes at work in everyday social life around the globe, as individuals and groups struggle to make saense of the health risks and inequities in their lives and communities. Authors address an array of urgent health concerns, ranging from food safety to environment, new technologies to infectious disease, in such contrasting locales as the US, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and North Africa, and across diverse ethnicities and social classes.

Building on the foundation of the previous five editions, Hospital and Healthcare Security, 6th Edition includes new and updated chapters to reflect the current state of healthcare security, particularly in data security and patient privacy, patient-generated violence, and emergency preparedness and management. The recognized leading text in the healthcare security industry, Hospital and Healthcare Security, 6th Edition explains the basics as well as higher expertise concerns, such as the roles of design, emergency management, and policy. Conveying a wide spectrum of topics in an easy to comprehend format, Hospital and Healthcare Security, 6th Edition provides a fresh perspective for healthcare security professionals to better prepare for security issue before they occur.

Medical and health activities can greatly benefit from the effective use of health informatics. By capturing, processing, and disseminating information to the correct systems and processes, decision-making can be more successful and quality care and patient safety would see significant improvements. Patient Safety and Quality Care through Health Informatics highlights current research and trends from both professionals and researchers on health informatics as applied to the needs of patient safety and quality care. Bringing together theory and practical approaches for patient needs, this book is essential for educators and trainers at multiple experience levels in the fields of medicine and medical informatics.

This book addresses information technologies recently applied in the field of construction safety. Combining case studies, literature reviews and interviews to study the issue, it presents cutting-edge applications of various information technologies (ITs) in construction in different parts of the world, together with a wealth of figures, tables and examples. Though primarily intended for researchers and experts in the field, the book will also benefit graduate students.

This book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date treatise of a range of methodological and algorithmic issues. It also discusses implementations and case studies, identifies the best design practices, and assesses data analytics business models and practices in industry, health care, administration and business.Data science and big data go hand in hand and constitute a rapidly growing area of research and have attracted the attention of industry and business alike. The area itself has opened up promising new directions of fundamental and applied research and has led to interesting applications, especially those addressing the immediate need to deal with large repositories of data and building tangible, user-centric models of relationships in data. Data is the lifeblood of today's knowledge-driven economy.Numerous data science models are oriented towards end users and along with the regular requirements for accuracy (which are present in any modeling), come the requirements for ability to process huge and varying data sets as well as robustness, interpretability, and simplicity (transparency). Computational intelligence with its underlying methodologies and tools helps address data analytics needs.The book is of interest to those researchers and practitioners involved in data science, Internet engineering, computational intelligence, management, operations research, and knowledge-based systems.

As economic and demographic conditions change, and technology advances, world leaders are becoming increasingly concerned with the future of health care. This comprehensive volume brings together North American and European experts in demographics, public administration, management, and health sciences to examine the challenges confronting health care personnel and systems in the industrialized countries. Following an overview of the general problems and methods of health care planning, contributors discuss such crucial topics as changes in the health status of populations; the impact of an aging population on health care systems; the prospects for reorganizing health care systems; the effects of new technology and drugs on health care; and the future of health care financing.

On investigative visits to nursing homes across the nation, Beth Baker has witnessed profound changes. Culture change leaders are tearing up everything -- the floor plans, the flow charts, the schedules, the lousy menus, the attitudes, the rules -- and starting from scratch. They are creating extraordinary places where people live in dignity and greet the day with contentment, assisted by employees who feel valued and appreciated. Perhaps most surprising, these homes prove that a high quality of life does not have to cost more. Some of the best homes in the nation serve primarily low-income people who are on Medicaid. In this new book, Baker tell the story of a better way to live in old age. Although each home is different, they share common values: respecting individual choices; empowering staff; fostering a strong community of elders, staff, family members, and volunteers; redesigning buildings from a hospital model to a home (where pets and children are part of everyday life); and honoring people when they die. Her visits to more than two dozen facilities include those associatd with the Eden Alternative, Green House, Kendal, and the Pioneer Network. Whether these transformational homes become the norm or the domain of a lucky few is the question that faces the next generation of elders, the baby boomers.

Enormous progress has been made in global health conditions during the past several decades, yet chronic hunger and illness persist in poor countries. The authors analyze the potential of international cooperation to improve health in poor countries. Drawing on various disciplines, including public health, economics, and other social sciences, the authors stress the need for collaborative processes and local institution strengthening.

This book examines the characteristics of sustainable remote health workforces and how management practices influence workforce sustainability in remote regions. It introduces the Integrated Human Resource Management (HRM) Framework for sustainable remote health workforces, providing a contemporary approach to remote health workforce sustainability. The book particularly focuses on the influence of localised management practices on workforce sustainability. For geographically remote managers, the book offers evidence-based information for developing effective management practices drawn from three separate, yet related research studies. This book will be of interest to managers and aspiring managers, working or planning to work in geographically remote regions across the globe. The book provides insight into the human resource management challenges for remote managers, and provides resources and practical management tools as well as suggestions about how managers can create their own localised management practices.

The National Health Service, or NHS, is the United Kingdom's national healthcare system. It oversees the public's health and ensures the medical wellbeing of the population of the UK. Governance network processes are complex because of the different nature of agendas and strategies of actors involved in health, but increasingly, because of the link between social and healthcare delivery, recent initiatives to provide a joined up or integrated approach have been presented. However, the extent of joined-up governance processes in the National Health Service is rather uneven. So far, reforms to try to improve the running of the NHS through the introduction of market mechanisms or increased decentralization have only served to exacerbate such tensions and resulted in further fragmentation of the public health system. The NHS and Contemporary Health Challenges From a Multilevel Perspective illustrates the complexities of governing public health services that are part of the NHS and takes an innovative approach by examining public health provision through a multiscalar lens, which reveals significant limits of the current governance model. The book raises the various challenges that clinical staff, public authorities, and the general public face in the provision of healthcare to uphold core values inherent in health systems. While highlighting topics including health governance, patient satisfaction, and public health, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, government officials, healthcare administrators, hospital managers, healthcare researchers, medical professionals, and students.

McGuire and Anderson bring the findings of the behavioral biology of group cooperation to bear on the vexatious problem of healthcare reform. One of the few certainties that we have is that the approach of the last 50 years--arguments between advocates of government or private insurance--has led to intractable gridlock. It is thus necessary to ask whether the initial assumptions buried within this controversy might have fatal flaws. In the authors' views, they do. Our modern society would never tolerate funding of any other necessity or convenience by such clumsy methods. In short, McGuire and Anderson contend we must pay for healthcare the way we pay for food, housing, clothing, and transportation.

McGuire and Anderson begin by examining the flaws embedded in each side of the current debate. They offer ten postulates around which any successful system must be devised, and identify the problems from the perspective of patients, professionals, and public and private insurance providers. Finally, they apply the knowledge of the biology of human behavior to the problem of enhancing group cooperation toward a self-correcting system, which avoids the current major pitfalls. A workable system, they contend, will be one that is compatible with human nature; not a perfect system, but better than we have, and more likely to work than competing theoretical constructs.

This book examines the gender context of HIV and critiques the global policy response. Anderson contributes to the feminist task of de-invisibilising gender as structural violence and identifies how gendered power structures are responded to at the local level in Malawi.

This Handbook provides a complete compendium of methods for evaluation of IT-based systems and solutions within healthcare. Emphasis is entirely on assessment of the IT-system within its organizational environment. The author provides a coherent and complete assessment of methods addressing interactions with and effects of technology at the organizational, psychological, and social levels.
It offers an explanation of the terminology and theoretical foundations underlying the methodological analysis presented here. The author carefully guides the reader through the process of identifying relevant methods corresponding to specific information needs and conditions for carrying out the evaluation study. The Handbook takes a critical view by focusing on assumptions for application, tacit built-in perspectives of the methods as well as their perils and pitfalls.
*Collects a number of evaluation methods of medical informatics
*Addresses metrics and measures
*Includes an extensive list of anotated references, case studies, and a list of useful Web sites

Starting with more general issues of healthcare policy and governance in a global perspective and using the lens of national case studies of healthcare reform, this handbook addresses key themes in the debates over changing healthcare policy.

Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.