To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. In Cleaning Up, the first book to examine this transformation in the healthcare industry, Dan Zuberi looks at the consequences of outsourcing from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality. Drawing on years of field research in Vancouver, Canada as well as data from hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, he argues that outsourcing has been disastrous for the...
To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparat...
In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the need for interprofessional cooperation in healthcare. Countless studies have shown that genuine teamwork and team intelligence are critical to patient safety. Poor communication among health care personnel is a major factor in hospital errors, even more so than the level of staff competence and experience. This is why many schools for health professionals and major health care employers now promote interprofessional education and cooperation.
Bedside Manners is a play about workplace relations among physicians, nurses,...
In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the need for interprofessional cooperation in healthcare. Countless studies have shown that ge...
Medical competence is a hot topic surrounded by much controversy about how to define competency, how to teach it, and how to measure it. While some debate the pros and cons of competence-based medical education and others explain how to achieve various competencies, the authors of the seven chapters in The Question of Competence offer something very different. They critique the very notion of competence itself and attend to how it has shaped what we pay attention to and what we ignore in the education and assessment of medical trainees.
Two leading figures in the field of...
Medical competence is a hot topic surrounded by much controversy about how to define competency, how to teach it, and how to measure it. While some...
One way to significantly improve the delivery of health care is to teach the health professionals who provide care to work together, to communicate with each other across professional boundaries, and to start to think and act like a team that has the patient at its center. The team-based care movement is at the heart of major changes in medical education and will become an element in the new accreditation standards.
Through its Centre for Interprofessional Education, the pioneering approach in this area taken by the University of Toronto has attracted international attention. The...
One way to significantly improve the delivery of health care is to teach the health professionals who provide care to work together, to communicate...
One way to significantly improve the delivery of health care is to teach the health professionals who provide care to work together, to communicate with each other across professional boundaries, and to start to think and act like a team that has the patient at its center. The team-based care movement is at the heart of major changes in medical education and will become an element in the new accreditation standards.
Through its Centre for Interprofessional Education, the pioneering approach in this area taken by the University of Toronto has attracted international attention. The...
One way to significantly improve the delivery of health care is to teach the health professionals who provide care to work together, to communicate...
Over the past twenty years, treatment of back pain has become ever more expensive and intensive. Use of MRI scans, narcotic painkillers, injections, and invasive spine surgery have all grown by several hundred percent. In some areas of medicine, newer treatments have improved quality and duration of life, but as back pain is treated more aggressively, annual surveys of people with back pain report steadily worse impairments. In Watch Your Back , Richard A. Deyo, MD, proposes an approach to managing back pain, which most adults in the United States experience at some point, that...
Over the past twenty years, treatment of back pain has become ever more expensive and intensive. Use of MRI scans, narcotic painkillers, injections...
Teamwork is essential to improving the quality of patient care and reducing medical errors and injuries. But how does teamwork really function? And what are the barriers that sometimes prevent smart, well-intentioned people from building and sustaining effective teams? Collaborative Caring takes an unusual approach to the topic of teamwork. Editors Suzanne Gordon, Dr. David L. Feldman, and Dr. Michael Leonard have gathered fifty engaging first-person narratives provided by people from various health care professions.
Each story vividly portrays a different dimension of...
Teamwork is essential to improving the quality of patient care and reducing medical errors and injuries. But how does teamwork really function? And...
"I am an AIDS doctor. When I began that work in 1992, we knew what caused AIDS, how it spread, and how to avoid getting it, but we didn't know how to treat it or how to prevent our patients' seemingly inevitable progression toward death. The stigma that surrounded AIDS patients from the very beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s continued to be harsh and isolating. People looked askance at me: What was it like to work in that kind of environment with those kinds of people? My patients are 'those kinds of people. They are an array and a combination of brave, depraved, strong,...
"I am an AIDS doctor. When I began that work in 1992, we knew what caused AIDS, how it spread, and how to avoid getting it, but we didn't know how ...
In October 2010, nine months after the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti, a second disaster began to unfold soon to become the world's largest cholera epidemic in modern times. In a country that had never before reported cholera, the epidemic mysteriously and simultaneously appeared in river communities of central Haiti, eventually triggering nearly 800,000 cases and 9,000 deaths. What had caused the first cases of cholera in Haiti in recorded history? Who or what was the deadly agent of origin? Why did it explode in the agricultural-rich delta of the Artibonite River? When answers...
In October 2010, nine months after the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti, a second disaster began to unfold soon to become the world's large...
Overseas volunteering has exploded in numbers and interest in the last couple of decades. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people travel from wealthier to poorer countries to participate in short-term volunteer programs focused on health services. Churches, universities, nonprofit service organizations, profit-making "voluntourism" companies, hospitals, and large corporations all sponsor brief missions. Hoping to Help is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of global health volunteering, based on research into how it currently operates, its benefits and...
Overseas volunteering has exploded in numbers and interest in the last couple of decades. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people travel from w...
