Showing titles in Policy & Administration

The health-care system in the United States has been called the best in the world. Yet wide disparities persist between social groups, and many Americans suffer from poorer health than people in other developed countries. In this revised edition of Health Disparities in the United States, Donald A. Barr provides extensive new data about the ways low socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity interact to create and perpetuate these health disparities.

The struggle against deadly microbes is endless. Diseases that have plagued human beings since ancient times still exist, new maladies make their way into the headlines, we are faced with vaccine shortages, and the threat of germ warfare has reemerged as a worldwide threat. In this riveting account, medical historian Howard Markel takes an eye-opening look at the fragility of the American public health system.

Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system - and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients.

The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence presents tested principles and best practices to help improve your corporate culture and customer satisfaction, which will lead to loyalty, stability, sustained productivity, and profitability in your own organization.

In a series of brief and personal essays, Why We Revolt describes what is wrong with industrial healthcare, how it has corrupted its mission, and how it has stopped caring. Montori rescues the language of patient care to propose a revolution of compassion and solidarity, of unhurried conversations, and of careful and kind care.

Since FDR, the US healthcare system has been mired in politics and policy. All the while it has only increased in complexity and cost. Today half of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to healthcare costs. Many community hospitals are barely getting by with single digit profit margins. With a system teetering on the edge of a systemic crisis, we need to turn to a brand-new approach to rescue the US healthcare system.

The sometimes fragmentary tales of these people, their lives and deaths, are not included in official histories of a place. How, Ensign asks, has a large, socially progressive city like Seattle responded to the health needs of people marginalized by poverty, mental illness, addiction, racial/ethnic/sexual identities, and homelessness? Drawing on interviews and extensive research, Ensign shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health care and public policy debates.

Remaking a Life uses the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a lens to understand how women generate radical improvements in their social well being in the face of social stigma and economic disadvantage. Drawing on interviews with nationally recognized AIDS activists as well as over one hundred Chicago-based women living with HIV/AIDS, Celeste Watkins-Hayes takes listeners on an uplifting journey through women’s transformative projects, a multidimensional process in which women shift their approach to their physical, social, economic, and political survival.

The same medical technologies that have brought us miracle drugs and unprecedented longevity are also forcing us to confront increasingly difficult ethical dilemmas. Thirty years ago, debates in medical ethics focused on the same questions that had once puzzled Hippocrates and Galen many centuries earlier. How society ultimately resolves these questions is not simply an abstract matter for debate by philosophers and ethicists. Rather, the outcome of these controversies is likely to affect each and every one of us when we or our loved ones become ill.

As a leader, is it possible to be both successful and humble? Studies show that today's emerging leaders not only prioritize achievement over humility but also see the two as mutually exclusive. Does this signal an existential crisis for healthcare - an industry that, at its essence, is supposed to embody humility and compassion? Thankfully, no, according to Intangibles: The Unexpected Traits of High-Performing Healthcare Leaders, which demonstrates that you can embrace humility and still be excellent at your job.

Research shows that nothing impacts patient experiences more than the quality of communication. The key to better healthcare outcomes is communication. Over the past four decades, the Academy of Communication in Healthcare has worked tirelessly with health systems, teaching communication skills that put relationships - between patients and providers, as well as among providers - at the center of care. Now, for the first time, ACH's proven and effective methodology is detailed in this invaluable step-by-step guide.

Press Ganey's chief nursing officer Christina Dempsey has worked everywhere in healthcare, from the ward floor to the hospital boardroom. She has also experienced the system as a patient and as a family member of a critically ill patient. In The Antidote to Suffering, this 30-year healthcare veteran and patient-experience thought leader argues that the key to improving healthcare is to reduce the suffering - physical, psychological, and emotional - of patients and caregivers alike through Compassionate Connected CareTM.

In Prescription for Excellence, Michelli provides an inside look at an organization that has become the envy of its industry - and explains how you can dominate your own industry by using the same approach.

Despite being the wealthiest nation on earth, the United States spends much of its health-care money and resources pursuing the wrong goal: curing people after they get sick. In this provocative book, Nicholas J. Webb charts a bold new path that puts the focus not on reactionary treatment, but on anticipation and prevention.

When Dr. Will Cooke, an idealistic young physician just out of medical training, set up practice in the small rural community of Austin, Indiana, he had no idea that much of the town was being torn apart by poverty, addiction, and life-threatening illnesses. But he soon found himself at the crossroads of two unprecedented health-care disasters: a national opioid epidemic and the worst drug-fueled HIV outbreak ever seen in rural America. Confronted with Austin’s hidden secrets, Dr. Cooke decided he had to do something about them.

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes listeners into the world of the American medical industry in a way no audiobook has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.

Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. At the heart of this story is a 34-hour period in September 2008. During that day and half, Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Manitoba's capital city, arrived in the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg's major downtown hospital, was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection.

In this book, award-winning journalist Beth Baker tells the story of people devising innovative ways to live as they approach retirement, options that ensure they are surrounded by a circle of friends, family, and neighbors. Based on visits and interviews at many communities around the country, Baker weaves a rich tapestry of grassroots alternatives, some of them surprisingly affordable.

Over the past several years, there has been an overwhelming amount of patients coming to the emergency department for medical care. It is essential for all emergency departments to improve patient flow by identifying barriers that slow the patient flow down and improve and revise these areas.

Cybersecurity for Healthcare Professionals is a conversation about keeping you and your patients safe from cyberattacks. With the ever-evolving risk of all internet users becoming victim to cyber crime, the healthcare industry requires extra attention in ushering forth a new era of preventative care that includes maintaining network security and protecting patients from an often-overlooked, different kind of threat.