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U.S. military conflicts abroad have left nine million Americans dependent on the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) for medical care. Their "wounds of war" are treated by the largest hospital system in the country—one that has come under fire from critics in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the nation's media. In Wounds of War, Suzanne Gordon draws on five years of observational research to describe how the VHA does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and ge...

This book examines how the digital revolution has reorganized the model of healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic and argues for a continued paradigm shift to digital healthcare. Katarzyna Kolasa sets the vision of healthcare 5.0 that relieves the burden on limited healthcare resources and creates better health outcomes by switching the focus from treatment to prediction and prevention. She advocates for a patient centric ecosystem that empowers patients to take control of their health via new...

In the United States, the entanglement of sports and education has persisted for over a century. Multimillion-dollar high school football stadiums, college coaches whose salaries are many times those of their institutions' presidents, psychological and educational tolls on student-athletes, and high-profile academic scandals are just symptoms of a system that has come under increasing fire. Institutions large and small face persistent quandaries: which do they value more, academic integrity or a...

Involving citizens in policy decision-making processes - deliberative democracy - has been a central goal of the Labour government since it came to power in 1997. But what happens when members of the public are drawn into unfamiliar debate, with unfamiliar others, in the unfamiliar world of policy making at national level? This book sets out to understand the contribution that citizens can realistically be expected to make. Drawing on the lessons from an ethnographic study of a public involvemen...

Samuel Mencher spent a year in Great Britain (1965-1966) interviewing leaders of professional medical associations, executives of the health insurance societies, and general practitioners and specialists engaged in private practice. His study of the private medical service twenty years after the passage of the National Health Service Act reviews the changes, problems, and successes of the National Health Service: trends in the amount and types of private medicine, the issues of conflict between...

Disrupting, questioning and altering the taken-for-granted ’cosmos’ of everyday life, the experiences of illness challenge the different ways in which social normalcy is remembered, maintained and expected. This book explores the manifold experiences of life threatening, infectious or non-curable illnesses that trouble the practices and relations of human and social life. Challenging a mere deficit-model of illness, it examines how the cosmopolitics of illness require and initiate an ethos that...

Evaluates the carcinogenic risk to humans posed by chemicals used in plastics and elastomers.

An explosive book that exposes the abuses of institutionalization. "How many brothers and sisters do you have?" It was one of the first questions kids asked each other when Catherine McKercher was a child. She never knew how to answer it. Three of the McKercher children lived at home. The fourth, her youngest brother, Bill, did not. Bill was born with Down syndrome. When he was two and a half, his parents took him to the Ontario Hospital School in Smiths Falls and left him there. Like thousand...

If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the information they need about a drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication as co...

How can caregivers remain both caring and strong enough to withstand the stress of their work?How can caregiving organizations effectively improve their management and practice?Increasing pressure on caregiving organizations to serve more people with fewer resources means that epidemics of burnout, high staff turnover, dissatisfaction and internal conflict often appear inevitable. Holding Fast focuses on the particular stress of caregiving work, its influences on the people and organizations who...

This benchmark publication assembles information on the current and anticipated effects of climate change on animal health. It empowers educators, managers, practitioners, and researchers by providing evidence, experience, and opinions on what we need to do to prepare for, and cope with, the largest threat ever to have faced animals on this planet. With expert contributors from across the globe, the text equips the reader with information and means to develop sustainable adaptation or mitigation...

This is the definitive work on Medicare's prospective payment system (PPS), which had its origins in the 1972 Social Security Amendments, was first applied to hospitals in 1983, and came to fruition with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Here, Rick Mayes and Robert A. Berenson, M.D., explain how Medicare's innovative payment system triggered shifts in power away from the providers (hospitals and doctors) to the payers (government insurers and employers) and how providers have responded to encroac...

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a research program on Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases: Dynamics and Control from 15 August to 9 October 2005. As part of the program, tutorials for graduate students and junior researchers were given by leading experts in the field.This invaluable volume is a collection of three expanded lecture notes of those tutorials which cover a wide range of topics including basic mathematical details for va...

The failure of long-term care is the country's best-kept embarrassing secret. Almost every adult in the United States will either enter a nursing home or have to deal with a parent or other relative who does. Studies show that 40 percent of all adults who live to age sixty-five will enter a nursing home before they die, while even more will use another form of long-term care. Part memoir, part practical guide, part prescription for change, It Shouldn't Be This Way is a unique look at the problem...

Controversial Issues in Educational Policy examines the current debates in US education including such issues as parental choice, decentralization, bilingual education and the role of business. For each issue, tensions among the conflicting ideas of conservatism and liberalism and among the basic societal values of equity, liberty and efficiency and excellence are examined. Bierlein discusses multiple aspects of each topic and equips readers with a foundation necessary to carefully analyze the d...