What is personal judgement? How can it help me interpret and follow official guidelines? How can I use it successfully in my daily practice? Rules and codes for healthcare professionals continue to proliferate yet are unable to offer practical advice in specific circumstances. To help balance official rules with the variable, unique human element, David Seedhouse and Vanessa Peutherer explain what personal judgement is and how it can be applied routinely and effectively in everyday decision-making in healthcare. Through the use of over 40 interactive scenarios drawn from real-life practice, the authors encourage you to use a range of techniques to boost your personal judgement, introducing different models and approaches to decision-making and exploring their strengths as well as their limitations. The authors then talk you through their own suggestions for solving commonplace but challenging healthcare problems.

We have lost sight of the vital symmetry between values and evidence. Values lie behind absolutely everything we do, yet we allow technical decision-making to dominate every social sphere, as if only 'the evidence' really matters.

In this extraordinarily original and compelling book, David Seedhouse advocates values-based decision-making as a much-needed means of restoring humane balance to social planning, and explains the innovative use of information technology to turn values into evidence.

The potential of values-based decision-making is huge and exciting. The final chapter of this seminal work points the way to a democratic future in which everyone's values can be seen and heard, regardless of technical knowledge or social status.

"Values-Based Decision-Making" mostly uses examples drawn from the health field. Like David Seedhouse's many other books, it will be of considerable interest to all health professionals. But values-based decision-making reaches into every arena of human problem-solving, and should therefore be read by everyone who makes plans on behalf of other people.

For information about values-based decision-making software visit: vide.co.nz

To join the Values Exchange(R) browse to: values-exchange.com

One moment life was normal, the next, governments around the world were imposing radical lockdowns of their populations. But why were decision-makers so readily ignoring centuries of hard-won civil freedoms? Where was the discussion of ethics and human rights? Why were we so easily controlled and why were our controllers so willing to do it? In The Case for Democracy, David Seedhouse explores the psychological biases; distorted risk perceptions; frenetic journalism; the disputed science; the narrow focus of 'experts'; value judgements dressed up as truths; propaganda; the invisibility of ethics; and the alarming irrelevance of inclusive democracy that have been features of governmental responses to the covid-19 pandemic. Seedhouse argues that the chaotic governmental response to Coronavirus, with no attempt to include the public, is the perfect argument for an extensive, participatory democracy; a democracy that demonstrates practical decision making by listening to everyone's knowledge and expertise. Now is the time for us to solve our problems together.

What is personal judgement? How can it help me interpret and follow official guidelines? How can I use it successfully in my daily practice? Rules and codes for healthcare professionals continue to proliferate yet are unable to offer practical advice in specific circumstances. To help balance official rules with the variable, unique human element, David Seedhouse and Vanessa Peutherer explain what personal judgement is and how it can be applied routinely and effectively in everyday decision-making in healthcare. Through the use of over 40 interactive scenarios drawn from real-life practice, the authors encourage you to use a range of techniques to boost your personal judgement, introducing different models and approaches to decision-making and exploring their strengths as well as their limitations. The authors then talk you through their own suggestions for solving commonplace but challenging healthcare problems.

Thoughtful Health Care offers a timely antidote to a Health Care climate dominated by endless rules, regulations, mission statements and codes of practice. David Seedhouse explains how simplistic labelling, mindless targets and empty slogans have created a delusion of control and efficiency, obscuring actual patient and carer realities. Using thought-provoking examples from health care and beyond, the book advocates the restoration of thoughtfulness, creativity, and independence in health work. By reading this book, students and practitioners alike will be aided in developing their decision making and critical thinking skills, and ultimately serve those in their care better and with more honesty. The book ends with a powerful and practical toolkit that can be used thoughtfully and effectively by every open-minded health worker. Thoughtful Health Care is for any health worker committed to caring with ethical awareness and practical sensitivity.

Joey Starfish can't survive out of water! Will the seaside residents of Sandy Bay come to the Rescue? Submitted for a Red House Children's Book Award "Joey Starfish needs help" is the brilliant new book by Kirsten Seedhouse.

Thoughtful Health Care offers a timely antidote to a Health Care climate dominated by endless rules, regulations, mission statements and codes of practice. David Seedhouse explains how simplistic labelling, mindless targets and empty slogans have created a delusion of control and efficiency, obscuring actual patient and carer realities. Using thought-provoking examples from health care and beyond, the book advocates the restoration of thoughtfulness, creativity, and independence in health work. By reading this book, students and practitioners alike will be aided in developing their decision making and critical thinking skills, and ultimately serve those in their care better and with more honesty. The book ends with a powerful and practical toolkit that can be used thoughtfully and effectively by every open-minded health worker. Thoughtful Health Care is for any health worker committed to caring with ethical awareness and practical sensitivity.