Based on long-term medical anthropological research in northern Ghana, the author analyses issues of health and healing, of gender, and of the control and use of money in a changing rural African setting. He describes the culture of medical pluralism, so typical for neo-colonial states, and people's choices of "traditional" (local) medicine (plants and sacrifices), Islamic medicine (charms and various written solutions) and "modern" therapy (biomedicine, in particular western pharmaceuticals). He concludes that the rural-urban divide is a fiction, that demarcations between these areas are frequently blurred, linked by a postcolonial, capitalist discourse of local markets, regional economies and national structures, which frequently emerge in local African settings but often originate in global and multinational markets.

This manual reviews the definitions and typical approach to quality assurance in healthcare and includes a review of the most prominent quality studies. A program for quality management in surgery is presented with chapters reviewing patient safety and external reporting requirements. An introduction to medical malpractice and risk management is also provided and followed by a chapter on how to implement the necessary behavioral changes to improve quality practices. The appendix includes useful protocols, forms and order sets.

"This monograph is devoted to an analysis of Medicare and Medicaid provisions together with a brief description of the conditions and events that led to their enactment into law. . . . Chapter 1 is devoted to the provisions of Medicare and attempts to appraise their probable effect. The conditions that gave rise to the law are reviewed in Chapter 2, and a brief chronicle of the legislation is given in Chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Medicaid, its provision, and its effect on state medical care plans."-- from the introduction--

This book pursues a multidisciplinary approach in order to evaluate the socio-ecological dimensions of infectious diseases in Southeast Asia. It includes 18 chapters written by respected researchers in the fields of history, sociology, ecology, epidemiology, veterinary sciences, medicine and the environmental sciences on six major topics: (1) Infectious diseases and societies, (2) Health, infectious diseases and socio-ecosystems; (3) Global changes, land use changes and vector-borne diseases; (4) Monitoring and data acquisition; (5) Managing health risks; and (6) Developing strategies. The book offers a valuable guide for students and researchers in the fields of development and environmental studies, animal and human health (veterinarians, physicians), ecology and conservation biology, especially those with a focus on Southeast Asia.

Through the framework of understanding health inequalities as a 'wicked problem' the book develops an applied approach to researching, understanding and addressing them by drawing on complexity theory. Case studies illuminate the text, illustrating and discussing the issues in real life terms and enabling public health, health promotion and health policy students to understand and address the complexities of health inequalities.

Here is the first comprehensive cross-disciplinary work to examine the current health situation of our immigrants, successfully integrating the vast literature of diverse fields -- epidemiology, health services research, anthropology, law, medicine, social work, health promotion, and bioethics -- to explore the richness and diversity of the immigrant population from a culturally-sensitive perspective. This unequalled resource examines methodological issues, issues in clinical care and research, health and disease in specific immigrant populations, patterns of specific diseases in immigrant groups in the US, and conclusive insight towards the future. Complete with 73 illustrations, this singular book is the blueprint for where we must go in the future.

Studies in the US suggest that about 4% of hospital patients are unintentionally harmed by treatment. These many thousands of "accidents" have received little research attention.
This book assumes that medicine may benefit and learn from approaches to safety in other areas and will be a core resource for this topic. The role of new technologies, both as hazards and in improving safety, is an essential new challenge which the book addresses.
The chapters are ordered to accord with their principal emphasis, beginning with conceptual foundations and moving towards safety management.
The first chapter gives an overview of approaches to safety in the psychological and organisational literature and provides essential background information for readers who may not be familiar with the safety literature. The next chapters demonstrate the need to take a long, temporal perspective. Finally, two chapters reflect on the nature of safety management and its particular application in healthcare.

Healthcare Systems Design of Intelligent Testing Centers: Latest Technologies to Battle Pandemics such as Covid-19 highlights the importance of designing intelligent testing centers requiring no human intervention during sample collection and testing of the Covid-19 virus and all similar viruses. This book introduces the background, medical requirements, and new research on medical robotics applications, including general Covid-19 testing techniques, development considerations for intelligent testing booths, kinematic and dynamic modeling, design specifications and optimization, numerical verifications, actuators, and sensors in medical applications of artificial intelligence and robotics systems.

In Eliminating Healthcare Disparities in America, Dr. Richard Allen Williams assembles the very best scholars on healthcare disparities to raise the public consciousness of this issue. These experts provide the benefits of their experience and expertise as a resource for helping others to make judicious determinations about how to proceed in efforts to improve the disparities in American healthcare. Arranged into discrete categories, this volume contains comprehensive coverage, both historical and current, of the healthcare disparity crisis currently plaguing our country in hopes of leading us all to a brighter future. The volume includes chapters of examples that are currently working and concludes with recommendations on how to move forward. The text is not intended to be one in which all of the answers are given to the multitude of problems. Instead, Eliminating Healthcare Disparities in America is intended to raise the reader's level of consciousness and concern and to increase the knowledge base about the issues. This groundbreaking text will be an initial spark that ignites the fire that may one day eliminate healthcare disparities in communities around the country.

Measurements of individual benefits of different health and medical interventions are fundamental for prioritizing among different alternative uses of resources in the healthcare sector. While psychometric measures do not necessarily provide information sufficient for assigning relative values to different health states, preference-based approaches produce measures that allow comparisons of such values. In this volume of the series of Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research, entitled Preference Measurement in Health, the papers cover altruism within families, differences in risk attitudes, and estimation of health benefits of food safety. Specific topics include efficiency and altruism, comparison of mother and daughter values of HPV vaccination for daughters, differences in risk attitudes between women and men, how context matters in valuing food safety programs, and valuation of health risks associated with pesticide use.

The theme of this volume is chronic care, health care systems and services integration. The volume is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on issues that relate to health care providers. The second section contains papers that deal with home and community based services for the elderly and those who need chronic care. The third section provides lessons from countries outside the United States related to the overall themes of chronic care, systems integration and services integration.

These are themes of growing importance in the US health care system as well as in health care systems in most other developed nations. The aging of populations, already underway, and expected to increase in the coming decades will bring changes and challenges to the health care system. Many of these challenges relate to chronic care needs, since chronic care needs are more important in the elderly than in other population groups, although chronic care problems are not limited to the elderly. Once people reach their 40s and 50s, they begin to develop chronic problems. Chronic problems often require both more health care services and more complicated health care services, and thus place an emphasis on services integration.

The purpose of this book is to place computer simulation studies within the paradigm of intervention research that is concerned with comparing the outcomes of health care delivered under different policies. This book presents computer simulation as a tool for testing various policy alternatives that have been developed by decision-makers within health care systems. This approach differs from the use of computer simulation in operations research, where simulation helps determine the configurations of a system that will allow it to function optimally. Although simulation of health care processes is not new, few health care systems have used simulations as a basis for re-engineering the delivery of health services. There is growing appreciation that the complexity of health care processes exceeds the capacity of individual disciplines-health services research, health economics, or operations research-to guide health care reform. In this book, the authors focus on bringing the methodological rigor of evaluative research to the design and analysis of such simulation studies.The book is intended as a reference for health services researchers. It offers a comprehensive description of the methodology of conducting simulation studies in evaluation of service alternatives in surgical care using discrete-event models, including the steps for identifying the clinical and managerial activities of the perioperative process, determining the model requirements, implementing simulation models, designing simulation experiments and analyzing the experimental data, and interpreting and reporting results.The book also offers examples of specific aspects of conducting simulation experiments: how to determine the number of runs needed to estimate the effect of implementing a health care policy; how to allocate the number of runs to study groups in simulation experiments aiming to evaluate policy or management alternatives; and how to use statistical analysis to estimate, interpret, and report effect sizes."

This volume covers some of the topics that are related to the rapidly growing field of biomedical informatics. In June 11-12, 2010 a workshop entitled 'Optimization and Data Analysis in Biomedical Informatics' was organized at The Fields Institute. Following this event invited contributions were gathered based on the talks presented at the workshop, and additional invited chapters were chosen from world's leading experts. In this publication, the authors share their expertise in the form of state-of-the-art research and review chapters, bringing together researchers from different disciplines and emphasizing the value of mathematical methods in the areas of clinical sciences. This work is targeted to applied mathematicians, computer scientists, industrial engineers, and clinical scientists who are interested in exploring emerging and fascinating interdisciplinary topics of research. It is designed to further stimulate and enhance fruitful collaborations between scientists from different disciplines.

Building on the success of Dr. Williams's widely influential first book Eleminating Healthcare Disparities in America: Beyond the IOM Report, this new volume takes a fresh and timely look at the current state of healthcare reform and the progress and problems we face in the pursuit of healthcare equity. This book focuses on how the elimination of disparities can be accomplished through targeted efforts made within the context of reform. Comprising the combined efforts of the nation's best health policy analysts, researchers, key opinion and thought leaders, and clinicians, this book addresses both current and impending legislation and future movements in healthcare. With the knowledge that the problem of disparities extends beyond the present political arena into the larger scope of all aspects of delivery, the authors provide critical analysis of the causation of the disparities, a striking call to action with implementable strategies for advancing equity, and provide insightful examples of what has worked.

Medical practitioners are continuing to advance their knowledge of the latest technologies in order to keep up with the opportunities for faster and more reliable treatments for patients. Advancing Medical Practice through Technology: Applications for Healthcare Delivery, Management, and Quality focuses on the latest medical practices through the utilization of technologies and innovative concepts. This book is an essential reference source for researchers, academics, and industry professionals interested in the latest advancements in the healthcare, biomedicine, and medical communications fields.

How good is the NHS, really? That is the question this book seeks to answer, as the health service emerges from the gravest crisis in its history with more money - but greater challenges - than ever before. During the pandemic, voters made extraordinary sacrifices to save the NHS from collapse. Thanks to these efforts and the dedication and bravery of the NHS workforce, hospitals were able to treat patients with coronavirus, but millions of others lost out. Now an exhausted and depleted NHS workforce faces a huge backlog. The gap between supply and demand for publicly funded healthcare has never been so wide. With record numbers waiting for treatment, the politicians' answer has been to spend ever more taxpayers' money. The question is whether throwing cash at the problem will work. Every day, millions of patients receive care that is fair, good or outstanding. In keeping with Nye Bevan's founding principles, the same treatment is available to rich and poor, free at the point of need. Public support for the concept remains overwhelming. Yet for every positive NHS experience there are negatives: care that is substandard, disjointed and arrives too late. A cult of secrecy surrounds errors and failings. Politicians on all sides dissemble and lie. This book seeks to strip away the spin and uncover the true state of the NHS: the good, the bad and the ugly. It explores an increasingly urgent question: in an era of pandemics, can the NHS provide the quality of service patients deserve?

The editor of this volume takes on the challenging task of presenting an encompassing view of childbirth in America from an anthropological perspective. The book is indeed comprehensive. . . . Collectively the chapters in Childbirth in America lay out a representative sketch of research problems of interest to sociocultural anthropologists and other social scientists working in the area of reproductive health. A distinct accomplishment is the acknowledgement in some of the chapters that not all American women want the same kind of childbirth care or have the same values and attitudes about pregnancy, birth, and parenting, and that this variation needs addressing in both childbirth policy and practice. American Journal of Physical Anthropology A comprehensive and critical examination of the experience of childbirth in America today, from pregnancy to early postpartum. This book covers many controversial issues in the context of diverse cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, which have arisen as a result of the new technologies and ideologies surrounding pregnancy and birth. Most useful as a text for courses in childbirth education, anthropology of women's health, and anthropology of medicine.

This volume is a group of essays published in memory of David Thomasma, one of the leading humanists in the field of bioethics during the twentieth century. A pioneer in the field of multidisciplinary research, having integrated major theological and philosophical traditions in the west with modern science, Thomasma was a role model to the authors who have devoted essays to his major avenues of inquiry. The authors represent many different countries and disciplines throughout the globe. The volume deals with the pressing issue of how to ground a universal bioethics in the context of the conflicted world of combative cultures and perspectives.

This volume examines many of the crucial issues of resistance in a clinical context, with an emphasis on MRSA; surely the greatest challenge to our antibiotic and infection control policies that modern health care systems have ever seen. Other chapters explore the psychology of prescribing, modern management techniques as an adjunct to antibiotic policies, and the less obvious downsides of antibiotic use.

-Rick Thomas brings his 30 years experience in the field to the text making it very applied and accessible.

-Lots of boxed material.

-"Recommended" purchase for all librarians as reviewed in the June 2004 issue of CHOICE.

A volume in I.S.C.E Book Series: Managing the Complex Series Editors Kurt Richardson and Michael Lissack, ISCE Research In this volume, Hugo Letiche tackles the all-important question, is there ""care"" in healthcare? If, as Klaus Krippendorff (2006) argues, ""meaning is a structured space, a network of expected senses, a set of possibilities .[that] emerges in the use of language,"" then within the healthcare systems of today, the meaning of ""care"" has been defined to be the eradication of a problem. We must recognize that patients do not wish to regarded merely as a problem requiring eradication. Letiche is opposed to the very idea that complexity reduction can address the humanity of each individual healthcare situation. He argues that, through narratives and through complexity based social theory, the complexity of each individual situation must be transcended through mindful listening and engaged dialogue. Letiche suggests that in the absence of such mindfulness, the lack of time for true listening, and the inability of providers and systems to allow for patients and family to engage in dialogue lies both the roots of the problem and the potential for its solution.If complexity theory has a role in the analysis understanding and betterment of social systems, then approaches such as the one Letiche undertakes herein will become essential tools of the trade.

What is the relationship between social science research and public health policy, particularly in the developing world? This question is at the heart of this collection of essays drawn from Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored conferences at Harvard University. The book examines the theoretical impact of social science research as well as specific case studies of successful applied research.

Beginning with a section on broad issues and the conceptualization of behavioral change, the volume then examines the anti-smoking movement in the United States; measures to prevent and control HIV infection in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States; anti-malaria measures; and the application of dietary management and lot quality assurance sampling to public health issues in Peru. The volume concludes with a section re-examining ways social science research can have an impact on improving public health. Scholars and researchers as well as policy makers involved with health research and international development will find this collection particularly valuable.

Exam board: CACHE Level: 3 Subject: Health and Social Care First teaching: 2017 First exams: Various dates Master the essay-writing skills and concepts required to succeed in the Level 3 Extended Diploma with this CACHE-endorsed textbook. - Covers all 15 mandatory units of the qualification and the two synoptic external assessments. - Clearly outlines specific learning outcomes for each unit. - Develop students' ability to display evidence and effectively evaluate their performance with dedicated reflective activities. - Help learners develop independent research and writing skills in preparation for the external assessment and higher education.