In this volume of "Research in the Sociology of Health Care" a variety of topics concerning patients, consumers, providers and caregivers are covered.

This book offers an analysis of the formation of contemporary hospital systems between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century. Based on extensive archival material and a broad international literature review, it focuses on the case of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, and uses a triple approach that discusses technological innovations, hospital management, and health policy. This research is a major contribution to the history of medicine which gives a unique overview of the formation of contemporary hospital systems.

The era of globalization allows for more connectivity between nations and cultures. This increase in international association gives citizens the ability to take advantage of opportunities in other nations, such as medical assistance and accompanying services. Medical Tourism: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly material on trends, practices, and emerging phenomena of international travel by patients for medical treatment and examines the benefits and challenges of these services. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as hospitality management, reproductive medicine, and ethical considerations, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for the needs of healthcare providers, nonprofit organizations, students, and medical professionals seeking relevant research on the relationship between global travel and access to healthcare.

The first systematic survey of Healthcare Infrastructure, this book describes the inevitable future of health systems. It gives a concrete plan for improved quality at diminished cost, via merger of personal medicine and public health. It discusses general aspects of infrastructure engineering and specific aspects of healthcare systems. It discusses current and future technologies for health measurement and management. This book outlines how the health of populations will be measured at the level of individuals, combining engineering and medicine to support viable health systems for the first time. This book is unique, in combining a systematic survey of health determinants with a research monograph on health technologies. Readers will gain a broad context and a deep knowledge of future information technology applied to health systems.

World-leading health economist Cam Donaldson defends NHS-type systems on the same basis as their detractors: economic efficiency. However, protecting government funding of health care is not enough: scarcity has to be managed. Donaldson goes on to show how we can get more out of our systems by addressing issues of value for money. In particular, he demonstrates what has been achieved through health care reform but questions how much more this can deliver relative to getting serious about priority setting. The issues addressed in the book have global relevance and this accessible book will therefore appeal to the public, health professionals and health policy specialists.

We have a problem in healthcare. That problem is this: in today's healthcare environment, especially in the United States, people take a back seat to the numbers in almost every aspect of healthcare service delivery. Productivity, utilization, and other business metrics rule the roost. If it's not calculatable, spreadsheet-able, or measurable, it hardly receives any attention from healthcare managers, administrators, and decision-makers. We can't simply sit back and allow the dehumanization that currently runs rampant in our clinics and hospitals continue to wreak havoc on one of the most important factors in clinical outcomes: the relationships between healthcare professionals and the people (patients) that they serve. Healthcare is a great and noble profession, but it will only remain so if we, as healthcare professionals, return its focus to its true purpose: people, the people receiving care, and the people working to deliver that care. After all, we're all more than simply numbers on spreadsheets or items on checklists. Better Outcomes: A Guide for Humanizing Healthcare outlines the 8 changes that organizations and clinicians need to commit to in order to return to the focus of healthcare to where it should be: the patient. The book covers topics related to truly patient-centered care, a biopsychosocial approach to service delivery, patient engagement, interpersonal communication, and developing long-term relationships with patients. Through an exploration of both clinical research and real-life examples and cases, the book outlines and supports a vision of a new healthcare, where skilled, competence, and caring clinicians care for engaged patients to promote better clinical outcomes, deliver unmatched satisfaction, and lasting relationships.

This book examines depression as a widely diagnosed and treated common mental disorder in India and offers a significant ethnographic study of the application of a traditional Indian medical system (Ayurveda) to the very modern problem of depression. Based on over a year of fieldwork, it investigates the Ayurvedic response to the burden of depression in the Indian state of Kerala as one of the key processes of the local appropriation or glocalization of depression. More broadly, Lang considers: What happens with the category of depression when it leaves the West and travels to South Asia? How is depression appropriated in a South Asian society characterized by medical pluralism? She explores on the level of ideas, institutions and materialities how depression interacts with and changes local worlds, clinical practice and knowledge and subjectivities. As depression travels from 'the West' to South India, its ontology, Lang argues, multiplies and thus leads to what she calls 'depression multiple'.

Drawing on contributions from user activists and academic researchers, this topical reader provides a critical stock take of the state of user involvement. It considers different contexts in which such involvement is taking place and includes diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the issues involved. This original and insightful critique will be an important resource for students studying health and social care and social work, researchers and user activists.

Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles and methods of daily continuous improvement, or Kaizen, for healthcare professionals and organizations. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better," as popularized by Masaaki Imai in his 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success and through the books of Norman Bodek, both of whom contributed introductory material for this book. Winner of a 2013 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award! In 1989, Dr. Donald M. Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, endorsed the principles of Kaizen in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing it as "the continuous search for opportunities for all processes to get better." This book shows how to make this goal a reality. Healthcare Kaizen shares some of the methods used by numerous hospitals around the world, including Franciscan St. Francis Health, where co-author Joe Swartz has led these efforts. Most importantly, the book covers the management mindsets and philosophies required to make Kaizen work effectively in a hospital department or as an organization-wide program. All of the examples in the book were shared by leading healthcare organizations, with over 200 full-color pictures and visual illustrations of Kaizen-based improvements that were initiated by nurses, physicians, housekeepers, senior executives and other staff members at all levels. Healthcare Kaizen will be helpful for organizations that have embraced weeklong improvement events, but now want to follow the lead of ThedaCare, Virginia Mason Medical Center, and others who have moved beyond just doing events into a more complete management system based on Lean or the Toyota Production System. It's often said, without much reflection, that people hate change. The experiences shared

The global nature of today's society has created more international students than ever, and these students face an increasing variety of demands while living and learning across cultures. Counselors are one of the key resources available to such students, yet they themselves have often not had significant training in this area. Addressing this need, Counseling International Students: Clients From Around the World, provides essential information for professionals working with students during cross-cultural transition. This book introduces readers to contributions made by international students in higher education, and supplies in-depth information about the nature of cross-cultural transitions including initial entry to the host culture as well as the return home. A framework of multicultural counseling competencies is applied with suggestions for counselors to increase their self-awareness, knowledge, skills, and abilities for organizational development. Case examples, throughout, highlight the range of roles and strategies that can be used in counseling international students, and the book is filled with practical information for enhancing counseling services for this population. The audience for this book is counselors and other mental health professionals who deal with cross-cultural issues as well as students in this area.

In this intriguing volume, Merrie G. Klapp explains how regulatory decisions in such crucial areas as public health, technological safety, and environmental quality are molded and recast. She finds that scientific uncertainty is a key factor, with agencies, interest groups, Congress, and the courts attempting to shift responsibility of proof or varying the standard of proof according to the pressures brought to bear on the issue. In general, Professor Klapp finds that when citizens or industrialists organize to protest a regulatory decision and when the legislature or the courts take scientific uncertainty into account, then the initial regulatory decision is changed.

By contrast with the United States, where scientific uncertainty is used as a public resource and rationale for change, in France and Britain scientific uncertainty is treated as a private resource. French and British scientists do not treat regulatory decisions as opportunities to reveal scientific uncertainty to the public--instead, discussions of uncertainties are held behind closed doors and, when reports are made to the public about regulatory decisions, scientific information is presented as if it were certain. Bargaining with Uncertainty will be a provocative analysis to those scholars and researchers concerned with the making of public policy as well as those concerned with risk assessment in public health, the environment, and technology.

This book addresses the topic of leadership in healthcare. There is a great deal of rhetoric around leadership, this book explores the rhetoric with papers that contribute insights into taking healthcare forward in the 21st Century, and the nature of leadership in healthcare and organizational forms that are leading the field. The book promotes Organizational behavior in healthcare as a serious academic field that can provide insights of use to managers, professionals, and policy makers in the healthcare area.

In caring for America's aging population, emphasis is frequently given to maintaining elders in the community, preferably in their own homes, with appropriate supportive services. But what of those older persons who are at home and without a network of relatives or friends who are aware of the often life-threatening problems they face every day? What of elders who are undernourished, under- or over-medicated, visually handicapped, hard of hearing, or otherwise disabled? Many of these older people may be unaware of their need for help, or are well aware of their specific circumstances but deliberately hide their needs from others for fear of being "a burden" or of losing their freedom. This important new book brings together a variety of authors who seek to assist family and friends in recognizing the danger signs that surround an at-risk elder, while making vital distinctions between those types of behavior that give cause for worry and those that can best be described as idiosyncratic. The essays offer thoughtful suggestions for appropriate assistance by caregivers and interested parties while at the same time respecting the autonomy and independence of the elderly.

This is the tenth volume in a series on research in community and mental health.

This is the eighth volume in a series on research in community and mental health.

The two most important notions concerning the rights of people with mental illnesses are among the most neglected: the first is that human rights and duties are complementary and that both must be considered in constructing a framework for mental health care. The second is that we must strive for equity in developing mental health programs. Inequity and Madness: Psychosocial and Human Rights Issues addresses both these notions. It provides the background and the facts about fulfilment of needs and the protection of human rights of people with mental illnesses. The wealth of information that it provides and the clarity of its presentation make it a document of immediate practical usefulness to all those trying to help people with mental illnesses and those who look after them. At the same time, however, the sincerity and vigour of its text make it clear that this book is a personal statement of commitment to the achievement of equity for all people, with or without mental illnesses. "I hope that Inequity and Madness will be widely read and share the hope - which was clearly on Professor GuimA3n's mind when he undertook to produce this volume - that this book will contribute to improving the quality of life of those with mental illnesses and those who help them to live through times of devastating diseases and misery that is often an unnecessary consequence." Professor Norman Sartorius - From the Foreword.

Health experts independently state that the most critical urban problems are preventable. This brings an added challenge to public health practitioners working in inner cities with predominately minority communities. In addition to deadly diseases - including transmittable diseases - violence, whether it is physical, sexual or child abuse, is the other predominant morbidity factor that urban areas confront.
Because of these concerns, there is a need for health professionals working with the communities to critically examine health behavior theories and prevention methodologies. Additionally, new prevention practices and programs need to be developed for community-based interventions to better serve the populations in need including programs in:

-HIV Prevention;
-Evaluation and Policy Research;
-Cancer Prevention and Screening;
-Urban Public Health Policy;
-Youth Violence Prevention.

DESCRIPTION: People with mental illness in the criminal justice system are a vexing problem in many countries. Efforts to cope with this problem have taken a number of forms and this volume explores the key issues in this area. Whether and to what extent any of these efforts achieve their goals remains a significant question for researchers from a range of disciplines and for actors and stakeholders from various sectors of the mental health and criminal justice systems TABLE OF CONTENTS: Contributors; Introduction; Criminal Justice Involvement and Severe Mental Illness; Where is the 'illness' in the criminalization of mental illness?; Treatment Modalities for Offenders with Mental Illness; Community mental health services and criminal justice involvement among persons with mental illness; Case management and the forensic client; The impact of 'new generation' anti-psychotic medications on criminal justice outcomes; Embedding Community Mental Health Service System Interventions in the Criminal Justice Process: From Arrest to Release; Jail diversion for people with mental illness: what do we really know); The nature of the alliance: an anthropological look at the practice of forensic psychiatry; Courting the court: courts as agents for treatment and justice; Prison, hospital or community: community re-entry and mentally ill offenders.

In "Finding Myself, " author Gelasia Marquez puts the puzzle pieces of her life together in this memoir. She not only reflects on the significant milestones in her life, but she also provides insight into the important people who touched her and impacted her existence.Born in Cuba in 1938, Marquez tells about growing up as a boarding student and as a confused young adult who suffered the effects of the political, religious, economic, and socio-cultural changes that destroyed her country of origin. She narrates her experiences as a student of Colegio del Apostolado, as a consecrated lay minister, a nine-year Cuban exile, a concerned bilingual school psychologist, a cancer survivor, a friend of friends, and a woman of faith. "Finding Myself" reflects on the transitions, crises, and challenges in Marquez's life and how these events-transpiring across three countries-played a substantial role in shaping her, her profession, and her future.

Organizational cultures and subcultures have played vital roles in the quality care of the healthcare industry in both the public and private forms of medical practice and education, leaving opportunity for the integration of principles focused on cross- cultural teamwork. Cross-Cultural Training and Teamwork in Healthcare explores the complex relationships between patients, physicians, and nurses with different cultural backgrounds. Integrating theoretical and empirical perspectives on medical teamwork, this book assesses the impact of diverse backgrounds among team members on the quality of care they provide so that medical practitioners, decision-makers, and educators can effectively make use of their cultural differences to provide patients with the best possible care.