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Communication and health in a multi-ethnic society

Communication and cultural diversity have become key focus areas as the health service engages with goals of health improvement and equity. This timely and unique book provides a rigorous and challenging review of recent research, with a particular focus on health communication interventions concerning service users who may lack fluency in English. The book shows that meeting the needs of all health service users, including disadvantaged groups, depends on both structures and processes of communication. This book will prove invaluable to healthcare professionals and medical students, academics, practitioners, service managers and policy makers concerned with improving health services for minority ethnic groups.

From community care to market care?: The development of welfare services for older people

This study reflects a growing recognition of the contribution that studies of the post-war 'welfare state' can make to contemporary debates about the restructuring of welfare. Drawing on the community care debates from 1971 to 1993, it illuminates contemporary concerns about such key issues as rationing care, the health and social care divide, the changing role of residential care and the growing emphasis on provider competition. From community care to market care focuses on the interpretation and development of national policy at local authority level in four contrasting local authorities. The results of the study will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the community care provision of older people.

Social work and direct payments

The 1996 Community Care (Direct Payments) Act came into force in 1 April 1997, empowering social services departments to make cash payments to some service users in lieu of direct service provision. Social work and direct payments guides readers through the issues at stake in this fundamental area of practice. The book summarises and builds on current knowledge and research about direct payments in the UK and considers developments in other European countries. It identifies good practice in the area and explores the implications of direct payments, both for service users and for social work staff.

Governing health and consumption: Sensible citizens, behaviour and the city

This book critically explores the urban governance of healthy lifestyles and the contemporary problematisations of the obesity, sedentarism and alcohol epidemics. To do so, it uses US and UK case studies to shed light on the complex socio-spatial dynamics of responsibilities for health and argues for an engagement with the construct of sensible behaviour at a time of its rising political salience. This book will appeal to sociologists, geographers, anthropologists and those concerned with the governance of health and lifestyle.

Speaking to power: Advocacy for health and social care

Anyone working, or planning to work, as an advocate for people who need help in dealing with public services will want to read this book. Advocacy is an area of increasing importance in service provision, where new ways of working have to be found that increasingly create an enabling, rather than a providing, state. Advocacy has an important part to play in this shift. Based on the experience of real advocates, Speaking to power is written in a vivid, jargon-free style. As well as practical chapters on 'what advocates do', using case studies from Scotland where important developments are taking place, the book discusses how advocacy fits into the broader scheme of things. Donnison describes and discusses examples of advocacy, with chapters dealing with management, training and evaluation of the work. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of various strategies which help vulnerable people speak to power on more equal terms. Speaking to power will be particularly helpful to advocates working with people who have mental health or learning difficulties, for doctors, nurses and social workers involved in advocacy, and for students preparing to enter those professions. It will also be of interest to students of social policy and other readers concerned about Britain's broader social and political development.

Towards the emancipation of patients: Patients' experiences and the patient movement

Despite a policy focus on involving patients in health care and increasing patient autonomy, much covert coercion of patients takes place in everyday healthcare. This book, by a leading patient activist, examines for the first time how the patient movement, which works to improve the quality of healthcare, can actually be considered an emancipation movement when led by its radical elements. In this highly original book the author argues that radical patient groups and individual activists who repeatedly challenge or oppose some standards in healthcare, can be seen as working in the direction of freeing patients from coercion and from its associated injustice and inequality. Combining new academic theory with rich empirical evidence, the book explains how looking at healthcare from an emancipatory perspective could improve its quality as patients experience it. It will appeal to health professionals, managers, patient activists, policy makers and others concerned with the quality of healthcare.

Credit crunch health care: How economics can save our publicly funded health services

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.

Work, health and wellbeing: The challenges of managing health at work

The relationship between health and work is widely recognised as complex and multifaceted. In the context of an ageing population our ability to enable people with health issues to continue working is becoming more critical. This multi-disciplinary volume brings together original research from diverse disciplinary backgrounds investigating how we can define and operationalise a bio-psychosocial model of ill-health to improve work participation in middle and later life.

Trusting on the edge: Managing uncertainty and vulnerability in the midst of serious mental health problems

Trust is fundamental to everyday interactions and the functioning of society. How trust develops, or fails to develop, within contexts of severe mental illness is a pertinent topic for social scientists and healthcare professionals, not simply because it is an under-researched area but because heightened uncertainty and amplified vulnerability amidst psychosis represent a crucible of the conditions where trust becomes relevant. Grounded in research within this crucible, this book explores a number of questions which are central to contemporary theoretical debates around the nature of trust. The authors link these abstract concerns to empirical analysis, involving interviews with service-users, practitioners and managers. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the concept of trust, including social science researchers and students, as well as practitioners, managers and policy makers working with vulnerable people.

The political economy of health care: Where the NHS came from and where it could lead (Health and Society series)

With a foreword by Tony Benn. Drawing on clinical experience dating from the birth of the NHS in 1948, Julian Tudor Hart, a politically active GP in a Welsh coal mining community, charts the progress of the NHS from its 19th century origins in workers' mutual aid societies, to its current forced return to the market. His starting point is a detailed analysis of how clinical decisions are made. He explores the changing social relationships in the NHS as a gift economy, how these may be affected by reducing care to commodity status, and the new directions they might take if the NHS resumed progress independently from the market. This edition of this bestselling book has been entirely rewritten with two new chapters, and includes new material on resistance to that world-wide process. The essential principle in the book is that patients need to develop as active citizens and co-producers of health gain in a humanising society and the author's aim is to promote it wherever people recognise that pursuit of profit may be a brake on rational progress.

Organisational innovation in health services: Lessons from the NHS Treatment Centres

Amid a welter of simultaneous policy initiatives, treatment centres were a top-down NHS innovation that became subverted into a multiplicity of solutions to different local problems. This highly readable account of how and why they evolved with completely unforeseen results reveals clear, practical lessons based on case study research involving over 200 interviews. Policy makers, managers and clinicians undertaking any organisational innovation cannot afford to ignore these findings.

Evidence, policy and practice: Critical perspectives in health and social care

This edited book provides a hard-hitting and deliberately provocative overview of the relationship between evidence, policy and practice, how policy is implemented and how research can and should influence the policy process. It critiques the notion of 'evidence-based practice', suggesting instead a more inclusive idea of 'knowledge-base practice', based in part on the lived experience of service users. It will be of interest to everyone in health and social care policy, practice and research.

Environmental Health Literacy

This book explores various and distinct aspects of environmental health literacy (EHL) from the perspective of investigators working in this emerging field and their community partners in research. Chapters aim to distinguish EHL from health literacy and environmental health education in order to classify it as a unique field with its own purposes and outcomes. Contributions in this book represent the key aspects of communication, dissemination and implementation, and social scientific research related to environmental health sciences and the range of expertise and interest in EHL. Readers will learn about the conceptual framework and underlying philosophical tenets of EHL, and its relation to health literacy and communications research. Special attention is given to topics like dissemination and implementation of culturally relevant environmental risk messaging, and promotion of EHL through visual technologies. Authoritative entries by experts also focus on important approaches to advancing EHL through community-engaged research and by engaging teachers and students at an early age through developing innovative STEM curriculum. The significance of theater is highlighted by describing the use of an interactive theater experience as an approach that enables community residents to express themselves in non-verbal ways.

Working With Dysphagia (Working With Series )

This practical text is indispensable to all clinicians working with dysphagia and is suitable for those involved in a range of settings and with a diversity of client groups. With its perspective on everyday working practice, "Working with Dysphagia" fills a gap in an area where practical and workable material is much sought after. This book is a useful resource for all therapists, ranging from students to specialist, as the practical assessment approach and comprehensive management strategies are supported throughout with references of recent relevant research.

Working With Dysphagia (Working With Series )

This practical text is indispensable to all clinicians working with dysphagia and is suitable for those involved in a range of settings and with a diversity of client groups. With its perspective on everyday working practice, "Working with Dysphagia" fills a gap in an area where practical and workable material is much sought after. This book is a useful resource for all therapists, ranging from students to specialist, as the practical assessment approach and comprehensive management strategies are supported throughout with references of recent relevant research.

Gene and Cell Therapy: Biology and Applications

Recent advances in stem cell biology, nanotechnology and gene therapy have opened new avenues for therapeutics. The availability of molecular therapeutics that rely on the delivery of DNA, RNA or proteins, harnessing enhanced delivery with nanoparticles, and the regenerative potential of stem cells (adult, embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells) has had a tremendous impact on translational medicine. The chapters in this book cover a range of strategies for molecular and cellular therapies for human disease, their advantages, and central challenges to their widespread application. Potential solutions to these issues are also discussed in detail. Further, the book addresses numerous advances in the field of molecular therapeutics that will be of interest to the general scientific community. Lastly, the book provides specific examples of disease conditions for which these strategies have been transferred to the clinic. As such, it will be extremely useful for all students, researchers and clinicians working in the field of translational medicine and molecular therapeutics.

Better health in harder times: Active citizens and innovation on the frontline (PDF)

For years the NHS has been the most trusted of public institutions and the envy of many around the world. But today there is turmoil. Painful shortcomings in clinical care and patient experience, together with funding cuts, threaten to dig deep into service levels and standards. Seventy years of technically advanced medicine provided free to the population has produced a widespread perception of patients as passive consumers of health care. This book explores how we may renew for our times the collective compact that created our public services in the 1940s. Voices from service users and service providers show how this can be done. They offer testimony of what goes wrong and what can be put right when working together becomes the norm. Sections explore new ways of living and working with long-term conditions, more meaningful and effective approaches to service redesign, use of information technology, leadership, co-production and creating and accounting for quality. Accessible to a wide range of readers, with short, accessible contributions, this is a book to provoke and inspire.

A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology #72)

The complex relationships between altruists, beneficiaries, and brokers in the global effort to fight AIDS in AfricaIn the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals descended on Africa from faraway places to offer their help and save lives. A Fraught Embrace shows how the dreams of these altruists became entangled with complex institutional and human relationships. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins vividly describe the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of those who seek to help, of the villagers who desperately seek help, and of the brokers on whom both Western altruists and impoverished villagers must rely.Based on years of fieldwork in the heavily AIDS-affected country of Malawi, this powerful book digs into the sprawling AIDS enterprise and unravels the paradoxes of AIDS policy and practice. All who want to do good—from idealistic volunteers to world-weary development professionals—depend on brokers as guides, fixers, and cultural translators. These irreplaceable but frequently unseen local middlemen are the human connection between altruists' dreams and the realities of global philanthropy.The mutual misunderstandings among donors, brokers, and villagers—each with their own desires and moral imaginations—create all the drama of a romance: longing, exhilaration, disappointment, heartache, and sometimes an enduring connection. Personal stories, public scandals, and intersecting, sometimes clashing fantasies bring the lofty intentions of AIDS altruism firmly down to earth.Swidler and Watkins ultimately argue that altruists could accomplish more good, not by seeking to transform African lives but by helping Africans achieve their own goals. A Fraught Embrace unveils the tangled relations of those involved in the collective struggle to contain an epidemic.

Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity

The untold story of how hereditary data in mental hospitals gave rise to the science of human heredityIn the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages. Genetics in the Madhouse is the untold story of how the collection and sorting of hereditary data in mental hospitals, schools for "feebleminded" children, and prisons gave rise to a new science of human heredity.In this compelling book, Theodore Porter draws on untapped archival evidence from across Europe and North America to bring to light the hidden history behind modern genetics. He looks at the institutional use of pedigree charts, censuses of mental illness, medical-social surveys, and other data techniques--innovative quantitative practices that were worked out in the madhouse long before the manipulation of DNA became possible in the lab. Porter argues that asylum doctors developed many of the ideologies and methods of what would come to be known as eugenics, and deepens our appreciation of the moral issues at stake in data work conducted on the border of subjectivity and science.A bold rethinking of asylum work, Genetics in the Madhouse shows how heredity was a human science as well as a medical and biological one.

Simulation and Synthesis in Medical Imaging: First International Workshop, Sashimi 2016, Held In Conjunction With Miccai 2016, Athens, Greece, October 21, 2016, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #9968)

The health debate 2nd edition (Policy and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (PDF))

Health care systems everywhere face multiple pressures from changing demography, the rise of non-communicable disease, the growing demand on health services, and limited resources at a time of austerity. Focusing on the British NHS from a political science perspective, this second edition of this best-selling book offers a fresh look at how it is coping with such pressures. The book explores the complexity of health policy and health services, offering a critical perspective on concerns including integrated care, the return of public health to local government and moves to devolve health services to local level. Crucially, it offers a critique of the market-style changes introduced by the Coalition government between 2010 and 2015. Students of health care and health policy, policy-makers and public health and health care professionals will find this lively and accessible reassessment of NHS reforms invaluable.

Shaping health policy: Case study methods and analysis (PDF)

This collection examines the role that case-studies play in understanding and explaining British health policy. Overall, the chapters cover the key health policy literatures in terms of the policy process, analytical frameworks and some of the seminal moments of the NHS. They have been written by leading health policy researchers in sociology, social policy, management and organisation studies. The collection explores and promotes the case-study as an under-used method and thereby encourages a more reflective approach to policy learning by practitioners and academics. The book will appeal to under-graduates, post-graduates and academics in social policy, public management and health services research.

Unequal health: The scandal of our times (PDF)

Health inequalities are the most important inequalities of all. In the US and the UK these inequalities have now reached an extent not seen for over a century. Most people's health is much better now than then, but the gaps in life expectancy between regions, between cities, and between neighbourhoods within cities now surpass the worst measures over the last hundred years. In almost all other affluent countries, inequalities in health are lower and people live longer. In his new book, academic and writer Danny Dorling describes the current extent of inequalities in health as the scandal of our times. He provides nine new chapters and updates a wide selection of his highly influential writings on health, including international-peer reviewed studies, annotated lectures, newspaper articles, and interview transcripts, to create an accessible collection that is both contemporary and authoritative. As a whole the book shows conclusively that inequalities in health are the scandal of our times in the most unequal of rich nations and calls for immediate action to reduce these inequalities in the near future.

Technology, Communication, Disparities and Government Options in Health and Health Care Services (Research in the Sociology of Health Care #32)

This volume includes papers related to issues of technology, communication, health disparities and government options in health and health care services. It fills an existing gap by providing a clear sociological overview and focus on these topics. Technology is considered from the perspectives of providing healthcare equity, health disparities and the impact on doctor-patient relationships. The topic of communication is addressed in the format of public health messages and the use of internet chat rooms for discussions about health care services. Government roles and responsibilities are reflected upon in terms of health promotion, marketing and sales of health-related products and improving long-term care programs. Particular mention is made to learning lessons from the experiences and perspectives of other countries. Finally, health disparities are considered in socioeconomic terms, with particular reference to aging, depression, measures of health and healthcare in rural locations.

The Role of Demographics in Occupational Stress and Well Being (Research in Occupational Stress and Well-being #12)

This peer-reviewed series promotes theory and research in the expanding area of occupational stress, health and well-being. Each volume of this series focuses on a particular topic, allowing authors and readers in that area to critically explore the cutting edge work from their discipline. Interest in organizational demography spans several decades (e.g., Pfeffer, 1983). However, in much of the contemporary research on occupational stress and well-being, demographic factors such as gender, age, and race/ethnicity are evident in the background and controlled in statistical analysis. In this volume, we ask whether that should be the case and the extent to which those demographics impact our experience of stress and well-being. Topics for this volume include age, occupational strain, and well-being using a person-environment fit perspective; race, stress, and well being in organizations; gender facades, biological sex, and gender role stereotypes in the workplace; age, resilience, wellbeing, and positive work outcomes; conceptual/theoretical issues related to religion and stress/well-being; and sex and sexual orientation on occupational stress and well being.