This book is the first of its kind about healthcare reform efforts in Kazakhstan since its independence within the context of the public sector reform movement. The book provides a brief background of Kazakhstan and its Soviet legacy and the country's efforts to modernize the health system, before creating an overview of the existing system, the reforms since independence, and the future of healthcare in Kazakhstan. This book will be of interest to policymakers, analysts, and development economists.

Smart healthcare systems, made up of advanced wearable devices, internet of things (IoT) technologies and mobile internet connectivity, allow significant medical information to be easily and regularly transmitted over public networks. Personal patient information and clinical records are stored on hospitals and healthcare centres and can be accessed remotely by healthcare workers. Due to the widespread increase in the sheer volume of medical data being collected and created all the time, it has never been more important to ensure that such information is collected, stored and processed in a reliable and secure manner. This edited book covers the recent trends in the field of medical information processing, including prediction of complications using machine learning and trends in visualization and image analysis. Further chapters focus on information security and privacy solutions for smart healthcare applications, including encryption of medical information, privacy in smart IoT environments, medical image watermarking and secure communication systems. Medical Information Processing and Security: Techniques and applications can be used as a reference book for practicing engineers, researchers and scientists. It will also be useful for senior undergraduate and graduate students, and practitioners from government and industry as well as healthcare technology professionals working on state-of-the-art security solutions for smart healthcare applications.

Drawing on years of experience as a clinical psychologist, online sensation Dr Julie Smith shares all the skills you need to get through life's ups and downs.

Filled with secrets from a therapist's toolkit, this is a must-have handbook for optimising your mental health. Dr Julie's simple but expert advice and powerful coping techniques will help you stay resilient no matter what life throws your way.

Written in short, bite-sized entries, you can turn straight to the section you need depending on the challenge you're facing - and immediately find the appropriate tools to help with . . .

- Managing anxiety
- Dealing with criticism
- Battling low mood
- Building self-confidence
- Finding motivation
- Learning to forgive yourself

This book tackles the everyday issues that affect us all and offers easy, practical solutions that might just change your life.

We all share identical properties that mark us out as human beings. Even so, every person is unique: we are not clones. It's the same with depression - or perhaps more properly the depressions (plural) - because they manifest in so many different ways and under different circumstances yet in essence remain the same. This is a simple enough observation, yet there appears to be little understanding of the condition - or conditions - among the general public, who tend to lump together all states of 'feeling miserable' into something to be snapped out of, a disease category to be treated medically, or a feebleness of personality to be disapproved of and dismissed. In this new title from Wyn Bramley, many different views on causation and treatment are explored. The emphasis is on real people's experiences from all aspects of the depressions - sufferers, helpers, family and friends - not a self-help work but an all-encompassing aid to understanding this common condition.

Warning Read this book at your own risk. Upon reading it, some readers may be afraid to visit doctors or hospitals for the rest of their lives. However, other readers might die laughing as they indulge themselves to the variety of the many interesting and scaring subjects that they will read about. If you're planning to visit a doctor or hospital, you should read this book before taking that major step that will probably change your life. If your decision is to go ahead with that visit, let us hope that you don't run into some of the bad doctors and hospitals mentioned in this story. If you ever had any kind of bad experience as a result of visiting a doctor or hospital, or if you ever heard of anyone else who had a bad experience, you should definitely read this book. This story, although fictional, has been comically exaggerated. However, there is a great deal of reality, and some readers will find it very convincing, especially if they had similar experiences as the ones stated in this book. The story deals with the daily occurrences in certain doctors' offices, as well as certain hospitals in a major metropolitan city in the Northeast of The United States. You will see the worst treatments performed by the worst doctors. However, later on in the story, you will also see the best treatments offered by the best doctors. The story contains a generous amount of extremely grim occurrences, but it also contains a great deal of generosity and compassion. You will see that there are some people in this story who went out of their way to do the right thing. You will also see that there are numerous people who kept the promises that they made to others when they were in need. If this storychanges the life of only one person for the better, even for a brief moment, then it was worth writing this book. The names used in this story have been chosen by the author as a description of each person or place involved. Actual names were not used in order to protect the innocent - and the guilty. It may take some readers a little time to accept the names, but after they have accepted them, they will find the story extremely enjoyable and very interesting. Some readers may find it to be a very valuable and educational account of situations that they should avoid.

Healthcare delivery reform initiatives focus on improving the quality of patient care while also increasing the efficiency of existing healthcare programs. Healthcare Delivery Reform and New Technologies: Organizational Initiatives contains cross-disciplinary research on strategic initiatives for healthcare reform that impact not only patients, but also organizations, healthcare providers, and policymakers. Contributions focus on the operational as well as theoretical aspects of healthcare management, healthcare delivery processes, and patient-centered initiatives.

Human Resources in Healthcare, Health Informatics and Healthcare Systems addresses two major problems that threaten the health of the human race. The first of which is the lack of human resources in healthcare. We need to ensure that we have an adequate number of healthcare professionals who are highly motivated and properly trained. Furthermore, we need to ensure that they have the latest health technology at their disposal, which is the second major issue facing the world today. The world's most respected scholars and practitioners describe their experiences and propose possible theoretical and practical solutions in this relevant and timely handbook.

This book observes that an in-depth study exclusively focusing on health service trade not only strengthens the overall services trade capacity of the South Asian region, but also promotes global as well as regional trade. There is a dearth of analytical research on estimating barriers to trade in health services, particularly in the context of South Asia, and as such, this book assesses the potential benefits and economic costs of barriers to trade in health services in select South Asian economies. It also analyzes the impact of liberalization and regulatory reforms on economic welfare. It broadly addresses issues relating to trade in health services, the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), such as: Why are the current levels of trade in health services low? How will the GATS legally affect a country's health policy? What effect might liberalization have on national health systems? And what are the likely benefits of greater trade in health services? It also provides specific answers to the following questions: Does the substantial role of the government in health - as health service provider, financial supporter, regulator and promoter - have implications for the treatment of the sector under the GATS? What is the impact of liberalization of international trade in health services on the quality and availability of health services in developing SAARC countries? Given the importance of consumption abroad for trade in health services, and the gradual opening of health markets through Modes 1 and 3 (cross-border supply and commercial presence), how can problems associated with trade in these Modes be prevented? And are these problems sufficiently addressed by GATS disciplines? Answers to these questions will be of great use to researchers, policy makers as well as practitioners and NGOs of South Asia.

Human, Social, and Organizational Aspects of Health Information Systems offers an evidence-based management approach to issues associated with the human and social aspects of designing, developing, implementing, and maintaining health information systems across a healthcare organization - specific to an individual, team, organizational, system, and international perspective. Integrating knowledge from multiple levels, this book will benefit scholars and practitioners from the medical information, health service management, information technology arenas.

An inside look into how hospitals, nurses, and patients are faring under the Affordable Care Act More and more not-for-profit hospitals are becoming financially unstable and being acquired by large hospital systems. The effects range from not having necessary life-saving equipment to losing the most experienced nurses to better jobs at other hospitals. In Health Care in Crisis, Theresa Morris takes an in-depth look at how this unintended consequence of the Affordable Care Act plays out in a non-profit hospital's obstetrical ward. Based on ethnographic observations of and in-depth interviews with obstetrical nurses and hospital administrators at a community, not-for-profit hospital in New England, Health Care in Crisis examines how nurses' care of patients changed over the three-year period in which the Affordable Care Act was implemented, state Medicaid funds to hospitals were slashed, and hospitals were being acquired by a for-profit hospital system. Morris explains how the tumultuous political-economic changes have challenged obstetrical nurses, who are at the front lines of providing care for women during labor and birth. In the context of a new environment where hospital reimbursements are tied to performance, nursing has come under much scrutiny as documentation of births-already laboriously high-has reached even greater levels. Providing patient-centered care is an organizational challenge that nurses struggle to master in this context. Some nurses become bogged down by new processes and bureaucratic procedures, while others focus on buffering patients from the effects of these changes with little success. Morris maintains that what is most important in delivering quality care to patients is the amount of interaction time spent with patients, yet finding that time is a real challenge in this new environment. As questions and policies regarding health care are changing rapidly, Health Care in Crisis tells an important story of how these changes affect nurses' ability to care for their patients.

Within the last years a variety of new healthcare concepts for supporting and assisting users in technology-enhanced home environments emerged. These so-called smart healthcare technologies are characterized by a combined use of information and communication technologies and health monitoring devices in the home domain. Smart Healthcare Applications and Services: Developments and Practices provides an in-depth introduction into medical, social, psychological, and technical aspects of smart healthcare applications as well as their consequences for the design, use and acceptance of future systems. The knowledge and insights provided in this book will help students as well as systems designers understand the fundamental social and technical requirements smart healthcare technologies have to meet.

This book explores the development of mental health systems in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) of Samoa and Tonga through an examination of several policy transfer events from the colonial to the contemporary. Beginning in the 1990s, mental health became an area of global policy concern as reflected in concerted international organisation and bilateral aid and development agendas, most notably those of the World Bank, World Health Organization, and the governments of Australia and New Zealand. This book highlights how Tonga and Samoa both reformed their respective mental health systems during these years, after relatively long periods of stagnation. Using recent scholarship concerning public policy transfer, this book explains these policy outcomes and expands it to include consideration of the historical institutional dimensions evidenced by contemporary mental health systems. This book considers three distinct levels of policy implicated in mental health system transfer processes from developed to developing nations: colonial authority and influence; decolonisation processes; and the global development agenda surrounding health systems. In the process, the author argues that there are in fact three levels of policy change that must be accounted for in examining contemporary policy change. These policy levels include formal policy transfers, which tend to be prescriptive, involving professional problem construction and the designation of appropriate state apparatus for curative or custodial care provision; quasi-formal transfers, which tend to be aspirational and involve policy instruments developed through collaborative, participatory processes; and informal transfers that tend to be normative and include practices by professional actors in delivering service merged with traditional cultural beliefs as to disease aetiology as well as reflecting a deep understanding of the cultural context within which the services will be delivered. This book argues that a renewed focus on the importance of public policy and government institutional capacity is necessary to ensure human rights and justice are secured.

Caution Reading this book in it's entirety may cause the following side effects: Surprise, Anger, Disbelief, and even Amusement. We begin by revealing the little known, inside workings of the pharmaceutical industry, based on the experiences of people who have worked there. Why do you think it is that your drugs cost so much? Is it because of all the high tech 'stuff' that goes into making it? Or is it something else that might shock or even anger you? What goes on behind the scenes often has nothing whatsoever to do with science. This leads to the second part which has to do with our health and the things you may not even realize are making us all sick. This is not just another 'eat right and exercise' book. You will discover information you have never heard before. There are even things that have been proven to harm you but have been covered up or ignored, and even encouraged, as long as there is money to be made. Do you like investigative reporting? Do you like history, or science fiction? Do you have a taste for the macabre? Are you concerned about declining health care, government and military cover ups, or the high cost of medicine? Written with some humor and at times a touch of sarcasm, there is a little bit of something here for everyone. You may or may not agree with some of the things in this book, but once you start reading it, your curiosity will make you want to pick it up again and again until you are finished.

This book addresses the challenges that healthcare organizations experience when attempting to manage the emergence of troublesome events or crises. It illustrates how experiences gained from event and crisis containment efforts can better prepare these organizations to prevent and/or manage other crises they may experience. Using a model outlining the relationship between a mismanaged event and the triggering of a crisis, the author defines the role of the leadership in healthcare organizations when developing, launching, and managing plans and programs to deal with these dangerous challenges brought on by crises, catastrophes, and disasters to their stakeholder networks. Readers with expertise in leadership and crisis management in general and healthcare management specifically will find this text useful in linking leadership expectations and competencies to event and crisis containment efforts.