Browse

This book compares the health systems of 11 countries to find out what the most successful, in terms of health outcomes, health equity and other measures, having in common. It considers patterns of social determinants, health funding and health expenditure, as well as the ‘first wave’ COVID-19 response of a wider sample 25 countries. Making use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it combines detailed studies of its eleven countries with robust, comparative analysis of them.

This book is an account of an ethnographic study designed to learn more about how families handle everyday life in the context of dementia, with the idea that if what families were already doing was better understood, their own efforts could be better supported. By following, and learning from, family arrangements for care, the question of what makes care for a family member living with dementia possible or impossible, easier or more difficult, is foregrounded. This question is also traced beyond the specific site of home to consider the ways that health and social care services and policy orientations are organized to support and/or hinder family arrangements. The book contributes to theorizing the intersections between what often seem unrelated: the formal care policies that articulate strategies to ‘manage’ populations of older people living with a diagnosis of dementia, the care practices of those at the frontlines who are responding to what often seem like overwhelming needs, and the care practices of families working to make everyday life liveable. The methodological approach and theoretical lens taken locates this work in a growing field of care practices research that is informed by the relational logic of material semiotics. This lens shifts the reader’s gaze from the isolated caregiver-care recipient dyad, and draws attention to the practical arrangements of bodies, objects, discourses, spaces and relations that constitute everyday living for persons living with dementia and their carers.

This book engages with the realities of life for people living with dementia at home and within their neighbourhoods while giving voices to the lived experiences of people with dementia across the globe, including Australia, Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Moreover, the voices highlight the urgent need for changes to ensure equal access and inclusion in neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods, then, become places of connection for people with dementia to wider communities and opportunities. The book also addresses the fundamental social aspects of the environment such as place attachment, belonging and connectivity. In an effort to help practitioners and researchers, the critical and evidence-based collection reveals the potential and challenges of dementia care shifting to a neighbourhood setting. Thus, the neighbourhood-centred perspective provides an innovative guide for policy and practice and calls for a new place-based culture of care and support in the neighbourhood.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in addressing ethnic health inequalities. However, there are misconceptions about Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups that focus on them as being hard to reach and difficult to engage in health services and research. This term is used routinely across all sectors of society. However, what is apparent is that they are “not hard to reach”, but rather health services and research “are not reaching” them, by assuming that health and health practices are experienced equally and services are effective for all. This publication illustrates how this term plays a debilitating role in problematising BME people. It is argued that we need to shift away from the using this term because it contributes to exclusionary practices and has implications for escalating inequalities in health and healthcare access for BME groups. The chapters in this book explore some of the exclusionary practices that occur in health research and practice and provides guidance for practitioners and researchers on how to avoid misconceptions about BME groups. Chapter 1, outlines understandings of key concepts and misconceptions about terms such as race and ethnicity. Chapter 2, explores the relationship between race, ethnicity and health and examines why ethnic health inequalities are occurring. Chapter 3, focuses on how we can improve research in this field to advance inclusionary practice. In the remaining chapters, principles of good practice and how to implement them by means of real research examples from the field are presented.

Adult social care was the first major social policy domain in England to be transferred from the state to the market. There is now a forty-year period to look back at to consider the thinking behind the strategy, the impacts on commissioners and providers of care, on the care workforce and on those who use care and support services. In this book, Bob Hudson meticulously charts these shifts. He examines the shift from philanthropic endeavour to state planning and provision, through to the marketisation of services and support. He challenges the dominant market paradigm, explores alternative models for a post-Covid future and locates the debate within the wider literature on political thinking and policy change.

The allied health professions have gained legitimacy through the pursuit of research evidence and the standardisation of practice. Yet there remains very little analysis or understanding of these professions. Adopting theory from the sociology of health professions, this book explores the sociological, economic, political and philosophical pressures that have shaped the professions. Drawing on case studies and examples from occupations including optometrists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists to emerging vocations, including pedorthists and allied health assistants, the book offers an innovative comparison of allied health professions in Australia and Britain. By telling the story of their past, the book prepares the allied health professions for a new and different future.

As many social inequalities widen, this is a crucial survey of local authorities' evolving role in health, social care, and wellbeing. The book reviews structural changes in provision and procurement, and explores social determinants of health including intergenerational needs and housing. The book begins with an overview of the relationship between health and housing, regional disparities and responses across England, Wales, and Scotland in the provision of health and social care, and local authority commissioning. It considers how the Municipal Corporations Act (1835) led to the establishment of elected town councils. In the mid- to late 20th century, municipalisation gave way to centralised government, which subverted the autonomy of local authorities. Currently, social care is provided and funded by local authorities and private funders. The main objective of social care is to help people to live well and happily, and live as long as they can. This person-centred approach is in contrast to the systems that have been developed to support the health care needs of people. In 2020, poverty still remains a key driver of poor health and wellbeing. With detailed assessments of regional disparities and case studies of effective strategies and interventions from local authorities, the book addresses complex issues (Wicked Issues), considers where responsibility for wellbeing lies and points the way to future policy-making. The Centre for Partnering (CfP), a network of universities working with the private and third sectors, is a key outcome of this innovative review.

This edited text is the second in the series entitled the Sociology of Health Professions: Future International Directions, published by Policy Press. It consists of eleven chapters covering several different aspects of support work and its relationship to the health professions, illustrated with reference to a wide range of different countries. Its importance is underlined by the relative lack of attention given to date to the diverse span of health support workers, in light of their growing significance in harness with the health professions in providing care to an increasingly ageing population in the modern world. The special significance of this collection, introduced by Mike Saks as editor, is that the various expert international contributions are brought together in the first social science book produced on the part played by support workers in conjunction with health professions in providing health care to users and their carers. This has crucial ramifications for well being in all modern societies. The support workforce and its place in the health care division of labour have too often been invisible in the past. However, this book, written from a neo-Weberian perspective, enhances our academic understanding of the role of support workers and helps to inform policy making in this critical field.

This book brings together selected research on commissioning healthcare in the English NHS carried out by national policy research unit in commissioning and the healthcare system (PRUComm) between 2011 and 2018. PRUComm is funded by the English Department of Health’s Policy Research Programme. The bookexplores the changes to commissioning in the English NHS quasi market introduced by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA 2012). It focuses on threemain areas: first, the development and operation of the newly formed commissioning bodies named Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) which were supposed to increase clinical engagement; secondly, technical aspects of commissioning being the use of competition and cooperation by CCGs to commission care in the HSCA 2012 regulatory context encouraging competition,and the allocation of financial risk through contracts between commissioners and providers of care (including new forms of contract such as alliances); and thirdly the reorganisation of the commissioning of public health services.The research demonstrates that the HSCA 2012 has had the effect of fragmenting commissioning responsibilities and in the process impaired good governance and strong accountability of commissioners. It shows how the use of market mechanisms has declined despite the pro competition regulatory regime of the HSCA 2012, and that more cooperative processes are used at local level to reconfigure health services. It concludes that strategic planning and monitoring of services will always be essential for the English NHS, whether the term ‘commissioning’ is used to describe these activities or not in the future.

Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical knowledges and online platforms meet around bodies. This book contrasts forms of health biosensing in significant life events ranging from conception to ageing. It explores practicalities, histories and promises of fertility and hormonal biosensing, stress biosensing, DNA genotyping platforms, and old-age biosensing. While the biosensing industries promote promise-horizons of the ‘soon’, ethnographic stories of failure and disappointment abound. ‘Living data’ may be about health for many people, but still happens mostly outside biomedicine or clinical practice. Yet biosensing has the potential to change human bodies and lives in barely imagined ways. This book argues for thinking about biosensing platforms and bodies together to understand that potential and to recognise harms and limitations.