This book examines the Facilities Management (FM) of hospitals and healthcare facilities, which are among the most complex, costly and challenging kind of buildings to manage. It presents and evaluates the FM service quality standards in Singapore's hospitals from the patient's perspective, and provides recommendations on how to successfully improve FM service quality and achieve higher patient satisfaction. The book also features valuable supplementary materials, including a checklist of 32 key factors for successful facilities management and another checklist of 24 service attributes for hospitals to achieve desirable service quality in connection with facilities management. The book adopts a unique approach of combining service quality and quality theory to provide a more holistic view of how FM service quality can be achieved in hospitals. It also integrates three instruments, namely the SERVQUAL model, the Kano model and the QFD model to yield empirical results from surveys for implementation in hospitals. Although the book was written from the perspective of FM service quality for hospitals, the findings and recommendations are also relevant for other non-healthcare sectors where appropriate lessons may also be drawn for FM and service quality in general. It will particularly benefit Quality Managers, Facilities Managers and Hospital Administrators.

Designed for easy reference, this concise manual provides hospital board members and executives with practical guidance on how to become actively engaged in the transformation of their organization. It focuses on how the healthcare industry as a whole is transforming and stresses the importance of having board members who are knowledgeable and skilled enough to provide leadership during this time of great opportunity. This manual is ideal for orienting new board members and for providing more experienced members with insight on key issues. It supplies a list of questions to ask stakeholders that will facilitate engagement and ultimately encourage participation. Each of the chapters is organized around action steps referred to as Top Healthcare Transformers. These are designed to disseminate best practices, build organizational quality, establish transparency, and develop the culture and leadership needed to facilitate change that is intelligent and progressive. Each of those 10 chapters includes - The Problem: A brief, quantitative look at the problem The Transformer: What will transform and make healthcare different Best Practices: Examples of current best practices indicative of the transformer Board Questions: Questions every board member should consider asking and every executive should be prepared to answer A concluding chapter provides the overall governance engagement checklist-the things to do to make certain that board members and senior colleagues are engaged and prepared to lead your organization's transformation. Includes a foreword by John R. Combes, MD, President and Chief Operating Officer, Center for Healthcare Governance

One of the most urgent issues facing the United States today is how to establish a comprehensive health insurance program at a time when nearly one in seven Americans lack insurance and costs for health care and medical fees are increasing at about 20 percent annually. An interdisciplinary team of experts provides a unique overview of the most important current problems and speaks to the key questions of risk, allocation, and equity. This text is designed for college, university, and professional courses in health and medical policy, public policy, public administration, law and society, bioethics, nursing, science and technology, and hospital administration. This public policy study offers a general framework for assessing health insurance from many vantage points, in terms of health policy impacts, the care of the needy, health insurance implementation, and prevention and risk. Chapters assess various national health insurance proposals, current congressional action and Medicare decisions, the social impacts of health insurance policy, coverage for displaced workers, the uninsured and hospital care in the inner city, charity care and community benefits, insuring high-risk persons, preventive health care screening for older women, and medical malpractice insurance, among other subjects. These analyses with real-life examples provide a solid introduction to all who want to understand health insurance and public policy issues today.

Medical doctors have been made political scapegoats for the financial crisis of healthcare and the failed war on drugs in the United States, says author Ronald T. Libby. In order to combat health fraud and abuse, the government launched tough new laws and guidelines designed to battle rising urban violent crimes, illegal drugs, and terrorism. But, by eliminating safeguards to protect the innocent, those same laws and guidelines also made it far easier for agents and prosecutors to arrest, charge, fine, convict, and imprison physicians. Current "witch hunts" for doctors include wiretaps and whistleblowers who get 35 percent of the fines, even before conviction. Under a new doctrine of "harmless error" a doctor receives no protection against false testimony. Libby explains all of this, offering cases from media reports, personal interviews, and records of trial as examples in this compelling book. Huge law enforcement bureaucracies have been created to target doctors for alleged fraud, kickbacks, and drug diversion. Federal, state, and local police are rewarded for prosecuting doctors and other healthcare professionals, while investigators and prosecutors receive pay raises and promotions, and law enforcement agencies seize the assets of doctors charged with felonies. Libby explains that doctors are prosecuted for billing mistakes, for referring patients to clinics, or treating pain patients with pain-relieving drugs. They receive large fines and long prison sentences, some even harsher than those given common criminals who've committed the most violent offenses. As a consequence of "overzealous investigations and prosecutions" of physicians, many more doctors are demoralized, refuse toaccept Medicare and Medicaid patients, and are fearful of prescribing pain-relieving medication. Join Senior Research Fellow Libby, who is also a Professor of Political Science, as he shows us why doctors have been "demonized" as corrupt and greedy entrepreneurs, how media sensationalizes doctors' arrests, and what unjust prosecution could mean for the future of healthcare.

Families today often face a range of urgent problems, and practitioners need to intervene with the most effective methods possible, methods which have been tested and that have proven clinical utility. Mental health service delivery systems are increasingly moving toward these empirically-validated approaches, and practitioners need guidelines as to how such treatments may be implemented in daily practice. Evidence-Based Family Interventions reviews the empirically validated treatments that are relevant for family practice in the social work setting.

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art contribution to a field that is rapidly developing, "The Behavioral Consequences of Stroke" provides a broad overview of the cognitive and neurobehavioral effects of stroke. As attention to paralysis and the more obvious physical disabilities stroke patients incur expands, greater attention is being paid today to the cognitive and neurobehavioral complications that impact stroke morbidity and even functional neurological recovery in patients. Written by an international panel of experts and edited by a neurosurgeon and by a cognitive neuroscientist, this unique title addresses the full range of issues relevant to the field, including epidemiology, general treatment, sensorimotor control after stroke, post-stroke aphasia, memory loss after stroke, post-stroke depression, the role of imaging after a stroke, and an update on some stroke clinical trials, to name just some of the areas covered.

Illuminative and an influential addition to the literature, "The Behavioral Consequences of Stroke" will serve as an invaluable resource for neurologsits, neurosurgeons, physiatrists and other physicians, as well as physical, speech and occupational therapists, nurses, psychologists, and other professionals. "

Research has shown that interventions providing psychoeducation and assistance to family members significantly reduce hospitalizations for people with serious mental illness, and help families cope. But research-based models have not been implemented in most mental health systems. This volume looks at the political and socioeconomic realities involved, and describes ways innovative family services have been provided, despite those factors, in many countries throughout the world.

Written by some of the world's leading researchers on psychoeducation, the text also includes material on the rise of family advocacy organizations worldwide. Professionals looking for innovative, culturally appropriate ways to help families and patients cope with mental illness will be most interested.

All over the world, women are organizing to improve their status in society and to better their health and health care. Women's activism is rooted in the global context of resource inequities between the North and the South and among genders, races, and classes within countries. Women fight for better health services and struggle with the pharmaceutical industry, and their responses to the violence they experience are at the very heart of their health movements. Most women organize first around demands for reproductive rights, and then expand to question care for the mentally ill, disabled, and malnourished.

In an effort to combat human error in the medical field, medical professionals continue to seek the best practices and technology applications for the diagnosis, treatment, and overall care of their patients. Improving Health Management through Clinical Decision Support Systems brings together a series of chapters focused on the technology, funding, and future plans for improved organization and decision-making through medical informatics. Featuring timely, research-based chapters on topics including, but not limited to, data management, information security, and the benefits of technology-based medicine, this publication is an essential reference source for clinicians, scientists, health economists, policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced level students, and government officials interested in health information technology.

This book presents the problem of attempted suicide as a meaningful and momentous event in the person's life with special consideration of its effects on the human environment. Five groups of people who have made suicide attempts were studied.

What is it like to be sued for medical malpractice? Bad medical outcomes traumatize patients but they also traumatize physicians. The litigation that often follows is a profoundly human, rather than just a legal experience. Although every physician's case is different, this book shows how each case goes through the same judicial stages of complaint, discovery, depositions, motions, and delays that lead to trial, settlement, or being dropped. It also gives doctors an understanding of how lawyers think and work to help defendants. Written by a physician and a lawyer, the book provides unique insights - through real-life stories - into the personal experience of litigation as well as recommendations for dealing with each of the legal process. It also includes up-to-date reviews of HIPAA legislation, the controversial subject of disclosure, and recent developments in the law affecting medical practitioners. Only about thirty percent of plaintiffs win their cases against doctors, but the journey from bedside to witness stand tests both the personal character and the professional skills of those accused. This well-documented book will help doctors understand and navigate the legal system while honouring their own ideals and emerging changed but stronger from the experience.

Healthcare organizations depend on managers to build effective peer relationships to manage complex patient needs. Today, top management is fighting the many headed monster Hydra from Greek Mythology. The organization is steeped in conflict between peers. But, as soon as one problem is resolved, two more have grown in its place. These appear to be personal conflicts, but instead follow patterns of dysfunction. This book provides the conceptual frameworks for identifying these and for developing peer to peer relationship competence in the healthcare organization.

This book aims to identify, understand and qualify barriers to the patient-centred knowledge sharing (KS) in interprofessional practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Western Medicine (WM) healthcare professionals in Chinese hospitals. This collaboration is particularly crucial and unique to China since, contrary to Western practice, these two types of professionals actually work together complimentary in the same hospital. This study adopted a Grounded Theory approach as the overarching methodology to guide the analysis of the data collected in a single case-study design. A public hospital in central China was selected as the case-study site, at which 49 informants were interviewed by using semi-structured and evolving interview scripts. The research findings point to five categories of KS barriers: contextual influences, hospital management, philosophical divergence, Chinese healthcare education and interprofessional training. Further conceptualising the research findings, it is identified that KS is mostly prevented by philosophical and professional tensions between the two medical communities. Therefore, to improve KS and reduce the effects of the identified barriers, efforts should be made targeted at resolving both types of tensions. The conclusion advocates the establishment of national policies and hospital management strategies aimed at maintaining equality of the two medical communities and putting in place an interprofessional common ground to encourage and facilitate communication and KS.

Despite emancipation from the evils of enslavement in 1838, most people of African origin in the British West Indian colonies continued to suffer serious material deprivation and racial oppression. This book examines the management and treatment of those who became insane, in the period until the Great War.

There are more than 80 different sleep disorders including insomnia, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, hypersomnia, circadian rhythm disorders, and parasomnia. Good sleep is necessary for optimal health and can affect hormone levels and weight. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and biomedical signals and images can help in healthcare diagnostics that are related to these and other sleep disorders. Advancing the Investigation and Treatment of Sleep Disorders Using AI presents an overview of sleep disorders based on machine intelligence methods in order to learn and explore the latest advancements, developments, methods, systems, futuristic approaches, and algorithms towards sleep disorders and to address their challenges. This book also discusses recent and future advancements in various feature extraction techniques and machine learning methods. Covering topics such as biomedical signal processing, augmented reality for clinical investigation, and sleep disorder detection, this book is essential for sleep medicine practitioners, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, medical technologists, doctors, IT specialists, biomedical engineers, researchers, graduate students, and academicians.

This publication identifies and discusses important challenges affecting eHealth in the EU and North America in the three areas of law, ethics and governance. It makes meaningful contributions to the eHealth discourse by suggesting solutions and making recommendations for good practice and potential ways forward. Legal challenges discussed include issues related to electronic medical records, telemedicine, the Internet and pharmaceutical drugs, healthcare information systems and medical liability. Ethical challenges focus on telehealth and service delivery in the home, Web 2.0 and the Internet, patient perceptions and ethical frameworks. Governance challenges focus on IT governance in healthcare, governance and decision-making in acute care hospitals, and different models of eHealth governance. The publication provides useful support materials and readings for persons active in developing current understandings of the legal, ethical and governance challenges involved in the eHealth context.

In India today only 35 percent of people have access to medicines. This book examines the rise of drug prices in India, and develops a new healthcare model, which if implemented, would extend access to medicines to India's entire population. Sensitivity tests show that the proposed model is affordable, equitable and implementable