The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work

In Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane.

Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies.

In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from New Amsterdam in the south to Beverwijck near the terminus of the navigable river. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor. Until 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York State, slavery expanded in the region, with all free New Yorkers benefitting from that servitude.

Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region's Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression.

Spaces of Enslavement writes a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York.

In Kidney to Share, Martha Gershun tells the story of her decision to donate a kidney to a stranger. She takes readers through the complex process by which such donors are vetted to ensure that they are physically and psychologically fit to take the risk of a major operation. John D. Lantos, a physician and bioethicist, places Gershun's story in the larger context of the history of kidney transplantation and the ethical controversies that surround living donors. Together, they help readers understand the discoveries that made transplantation relatively safe and effective as well as the legal, ethical, and economic policies that make it feasible.

Gershun and Lantos explore the steps involved in recovering and allocating organs. They analyze the differences that arise depending on whether the organ comes from a living donor or one who has died. They observe the expertise—and the shortcomings—of doctors, nurses, and other professionals and describe the burdens that we place on people who are willing to donate. In this raw and vivid book, Gershun and Lantos ask us to consider just how far society should go in using one person's healthy body parts in order to save another person.

Kidney to Share provides an account of organ donation that is both personal and analytical. The combination of perspectives leads to a profound and compelling exploration of a largely opaque practice. Gershun and Lantos pull back the curtain to offer readers a more transparent view of the fascinating world of organ donation.

In Beyond Medicine, Paul V. Dutton provides a penetrating historical analysis of why countless studies show that Americans are far less healthy than their European counterparts.

Dutton argues that Europeans are healthier than Americans because beginning in the late nineteenth century European nations began construction of health systems that focused not only on medical care but the broad social determinants of health: where and how we live, work, play, and age. European leaders also created social safety nets that became integral to national economic policy. In contrast, US leaders often viewed investments to improve the social determinants of health and safety-net programs as a competing priority to economic growth.

Beyond Medicine compares the US to three European social democracies—France, Germany, and Sweden—in order to explain how, in differing ways, each protects the health of infants and children, working-age adults, and the elderly. Unlike most comparative health system analyses, Dutton draws on history to find answers to our most nettlesome health policy questions.

The number of elderly and disabled Americans in need of home health care is increasing annually, even as the pool of people—almost always women—willing to do this job gets smaller and smaller. The Caring Class takes readers inside the reality of home health care by following the lives of women training and working as home health aides in the South Bronx.

Richard Schweid examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die. By improving the job of home health aide, Schweid shows, we can reduce income inequality and create a pool of qualified, competent home health care providers who would contribute to the well-being of us all.

The Caring Class also serves as a guide into the world of our home health care system. Nearly 50 million US families look after an elderly or disabled loved one. This book explains the issues and choices they face. Schweid explores the narratives, histories, and people behind home health care in the United States, examining how we might improve the lives of both those who receive care and those who provide it.

Don't Count Me Out chronicles the life of Bruce White from the beginning of his drug use in elementary school through criminal acts fueled by his need for drugs, to his miraculous recovery three decades later and involvement in the treatment of addicts, where he is now a leader in the rehabilitation field.

Rafael Alvarez's recounting of White's journey should inspire those dealing with the fallout of addiction. Alvarez, a journalist and screenwriter, allows the reader to get inside the head of an addict who was stealing alcohol from his parents at the age of nine, selling drugs and tripping on LSD and PCP by the time he hit seventh grade, and hooked on morphine before he turned fifteen. "Bruce White? I thought he was dead?" is a response encountered in many of the interviews Alvarez conducted.

Don't Count Me Out shines a spotlight on an improbable and stunning miracle. Though this is just one person's story, the contributing factors of early sexual assault, the role of permissive preoccupied parents, and the need for peer approval, among others, will resonate with many as the opioid crisis continues to haunt us.

Japan is the fastest aging country, with the largest super-aged society in the world and growing larger by the day, yet its universal health care costs are relatively low. In Health Insurance Politics in Japan, Takakazu Yamagishi draws back the curtain for an international audience and investigates how Japan has been able to control health care costs through health insurance politics.

Covering the period from the Meiji Restoration to the Abe Administration, Yamagishi uses a historical institutionalist approach to examine the driving force behind the development of health insurance policies in Japan. Yamagishi pays special attention to the roles of government and medical professionals, the main actors of the policymaking and medical worlds, in this development. Health Insurance Politics in Japan pushes Japan into the spotlight of the international conversation about health care reform.

In this collection of beautiful and raw essays, Amy S. F. Lutz writes openly about her experience—the positive and the negative—as a mother of a now twenty-one-year-old son with severe autism. Lutz's human emotion drives through each page and challenges commonly held ideas that define autism either as a disease or as neurodiversity. We Walk is inspired by her own questions: What is the place of intellectually and developmentally disabled people in society? What responsibilities do we, as citizens and human beings, have to one another? Who should decide for those who cannot decide for themselves? What is the meaning of religion to someone with no abstract language? Exploring these questions, We Walk directly—and humanly—examines social issues such as inclusion, religion, therapeutics, and friendship through the lens of severe autism.

In a world where public perception of autism is largely shaped by the "quirky geniuses" featured on television shows like The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor, We Walk demands that we center our debates about this disorder on those who are most affected by its impacts.

Helping Soldiers Heal tells the story of the US Army's transformation from a disparate collection of poorly standardized, largely disconnected clinics into one of the nation's leading mental health care systems. It is a step-by-step guidebook for military and civilian health care systems alike. Jayakanth Srinivasan and Christopher Ivany provide a unique insider-outsider perspective as key participants in the process, sharing how they confronted the challenges firsthand and helped craft and guide the unfolding change.

The Army's system was being overwhelmed with mental health problems among soldiers and their family members, impeding combat readiness. The key to the transformation was to apply the tenets of "learning" health care systems. Building a learning health care system is hard; building a learning mental health care system is even harder. As Helping Soldiers Heal recounts, the Army overcame the barriers to success, and its experience is full of lessons for any health care system seeking to transform.

In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security.

Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics.

What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.

In More Than Medicine, LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of nurse practitioners (NPs) working on the front lines of the American health care crisis as they cared for four hundred African American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed medical, social, and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing "difficult people" for both their employer and the state. Through More Than Medicine, we discover that the problems found in the NP's exam room are as much a product of our nation's disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs.

Mixing personal history, interviewee voices, and academic theory from the fields of care work, the sociology of work, medical sociology, and nursing, Taking Care of Our Own introduces us to the hidden world of family caregivers. Using a multidimensional approach, Sherry N. Mong seeks to understand and analyze the types of skilled work that family caregivers do, the processes through which they learn and negotiate new skills, and the meanings that both caregivers and nurses attach to their care work.

Taking Care of Our Own is based on sixty-two in-depth interviews with family caregivers, home and community health care nurses, and other expert observers to provide a lens through which in-home care processes are analyzed, while also exploring how caregivers learn necessary procedures. Further, Mong examines the emotional labor of caregiving, as well as the identities of caregivers and nurses who are key players in the labor process, and gives attention to the ways in which the labor is transferred from medical professionals to family caregivers.

In Anti/Vax, Bernice L. Hausman challenges the widespread perception of vaccine skepticism shaped by media, celebrities, and internet misinformation. She explores other motivations behind vaccine hesitancy, including distrust of pharmaceutical companies and the belief that illness plays a role in good health. Seeking to reframe the conversation, she shows that when resistance to vaccination is portrayed as scientific illiteracy, denial of scientific facts, or simply as irrational, we lose opportunities to understand many people's real concerns.

Anti/Vax reveals that resistance to vaccination consolidates a number of cultural issues—from critiques of medicalization to concerns about government overreach—and raises questions about public health norms. Researched and published before the Covid-19 pandemic, Hausman's rich exploration of the cultural themes animating vaccine skepticism continues to illuminate controversies over vaccination today.

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 geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life. In the unusual culture of solidarity between patients and providers that the VHA has fostered, Gordon finds a working model for higher-quality health care and a much-needed alternative to the practice of for-profit medicine.

When Eric Wendel was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 1966, the survival rate was 10 percent. Today, it is 90 percent. Even as politicians call for a "Cancer Moonshot," this accomplishment remains a pinnacle in cancer research.

The author's daughter, then a medical student at Georgetown Medical School, told her father about this amazing success story. Tim Wendel soon discovered that many of the doctors at the forefront of this effort cared for his brother at Roswell Park in Buffalo, New York. Wendel went in search of this extraordinary group, interviewing Lucius Sinks, James Holland, Donald Pinkel, and others in the field. If there were a Mount Rushmore for cancer research, they would be on it.

Despite being ostracized by their medical peers, these doctors developed modern-day chemotherapy practices and invented the blood centrifuge machine, helping thousands of children live longer lives. Part family memoir and part medical narrative, Cancer Crossings explores how the Wendel family found the courage to move ahead with their lives. They learned to sail on Lake Ontario, cruising across miles of open water together, even as the campaign against cancer changed their lives forever.

In Prescription for the People, Fran Quigley diagnoses our inability to get medicines to the people who need them and then prescribes the cure. He delivers a clear and convincing argument for a complete shift in the global and U.S. approach to developing and providing essential medicines—and a primer on how to make that change happen.

Globally, 10 million people die each year because they are unable to pay for medicines that would save them. The cost of prescription drugs is bankrupting families and putting a strain on state and federal budgets. Patients' desperate need for affordable medicines clashes with the core business model of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, which maximizes profits whenever possible. It doesn't have to be this way. Patients and activists are aiming to make all essential medicines affordable by reclaiming medicines as a public good and a human right, instead of a profit-making commodity. In this book, Quigley demystifies statistics and terminology, offers solutions to the problems that block universal access to medicines, and provides a road map for activists wanting to make those solutions a reality.

Even the most capable individuals are challenged when confronted with the complexity of the modern hospital experience. The Informed Patient is a guide and a workbook, divided into topical, focused sections with step-by-step instructions, insights, and tips to illustrate what patients and their families can expect during a hospital stay. Anyone who will experience a hospital stay—or friends or family who may be in charge of a patient's care—will find all the help and advice they could need in the detailed sections that cover every aspect of what they can expect.

Karen A. Friedman, MD, and Sara L. Merwin, MPH, offer hands-on advice about how patients, health care providers, and medical staff can work together to achieve good outcomes. Through anecdotes, tips, sidebars, and clinical scenario vignettes, The Informed Patient presents ways to enhance and optimize a hospital stay, from practical advice on obtaining the best care to dealing with the emotional experience of being in the hospital.

India and the Patent Wars contributes to an international debate over the costs of medicine and restrictions on access under stringent patent laws showing how activists and drug companies in low-income countries seize agency and exert influence over these processes. Murphy Halliburton contributes to analyses of globalization within the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, and public health by drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with pharmaceutical producers in India and the United States.

India has been at the center of emerging controversies around patent rights related to pharmaceutical production and local medical knowledge. Halliburton shows that Big Pharma is not all-powerful, and that local activists and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, have been able to undermine the aspirations of multinational companies and the WTO. Halliburton traces how key drug prices have gone down, not up, in low-income countries under the new patent regime through partnerships between US- and India-based companies, but warns us to be aware of access to essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries going forward.

At a time when the world's wealthiest nations struggle to make health care and medicine available to everyone, why do resource-constrained countries make costly commitments to universal health coverage and AIDS treatment after transitioning to democracy? Joseph Harris explores the dynamics that made landmark policies possible in Thailand and Brazil but which have led to prolonged struggle and contestation in South Africa. Drawing on firsthand accounts of the people wrestling with these issues, Achieving Access documents efforts to institutionalize universal healthcare and expand access to life-saving medicines in three major industrializing countries.

In comparing two separate but related policy areas, Harris finds that democratization empowers elite professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, to advocate for universal health care and treatment for AIDS. Harris's analysis is situated at the intersection of sociology, political science, and public health and will speak to scholars with interests in health policy, comparative politics, social policy, and democracy in the developing world. In light of the growing interest in health insurance generated by implementation of the Affordable Care Act (as well as the coming changes poised to be made to it), Achieving Access will also be useful to policymakers in developing countries and officials working on health policy in the United States.

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan.

In Deadly River, Ralph R. Frerichs tells the story of the Haitian cholera epidemic, of a French disease detective determined to trace its origins so that he could help contain the spread and possibly eliminate the disease, and the political intrigue that has made that effort so difficult.

There is constant pressure on hospitals to improve health care delivery and increase cost effectiveness. New initiatives are the order of the day in the dramatically different health care systems of the United States and Great Britain. Often, as we know all too well, these efforts are not successful. In The Challenge to Change, Rebecca Kolins Givan analyzes the successes and failures of efforts to improve hospitals and explains what factors make it likely that the implementation of reforms will rewarded by positive transformation in a particular institution's day-to-day operation. Givan's in-depth qualitative case studies of both top-down initiatives and changes first suggested by staff on the front lines of care point clearly to the importance of all hospital workers in effecting change and even influencing national policy.

Givan illuminates the critical role of workers, managers, and unions in enabling or constraining changes in policies and procedures and ensuring their implementation. Givan spotlights an Anglo-American model of hospital care and work organization, even while these countries retain their differences in access and payment. Entrenched professional roles, hierarchical workplace organization, and the sometimes-detached view of policymakers all shape the prospects for change in hospitals. Givan provides important examples of how the dedication and imagination of the people who work in hospitals can make all the difference when it comes to providing quality health care even in a challenging economic environment.

Andy Lazris, MD, is a practicing primary care physician who experiences the effects of Medicare policy on a daily basis. As a result, he believes that the way we care for our elderly has taken a wrong turn and that Medicare is complicit in creating the very problems it seeks to solve. Aging is not a disease to be cured; it is a life stage to be lived. Lazris argues that aggressive treatments cannot change that fact but only get in the way and decrease quality of life. Unfortunately, Medicare's payment structure and rules deprive the elderly of the chance to pursue less aggressive care, which often yields the most humane and effective results. Medicare encourages and will pay more readily for hospitalization than for palliative and home care. It encourages and pays for high-tech assaults on disease rather than for the primary care that can make a real difference in the lives of the elderly.

Lazris offers straightforward solutions to ensure Medicare's solvency through sensible cost-effective plans that do not restrict patient choice or negate the doctor-patient relationship. Using both data and personal stories, he shows how Medicare needs to change in structure and purpose as the population ages, the physician pool becomes more specialized, and new medical technology becomes available. Curing Medicare demonstrates which medical interventions (medicines, tests, procedures) work and which can be harmful in many common conditions in the elderly; the harms and benefits of hospitalization; the current culture of long-term care; and how Medicare often promotes care that is ineffective, expensive, and contrary to what many elderly patients and their families really want.

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 drawbacks, and how it might be organized to contribute most effectively.

"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, entitled, admirable, self-centered, amazing, strange, funny, daring, gifted, exasperating, wonderful, and sad. And more. At my clinic most of the patients are indigent and few have had an education beyond high school, if that. Many are gay men and many of the patients use or have used drugs. They all have HIV, and in the early days far too many of them died. Every day they brought us the stories of their lives. We listened to them and we took care of them as best we could."—from the Introduction

In 1992, Dr. Susan C. Ball began her medical career taking care of patients with HIV in the Center for Special Studies, a designated AIDS care center at a large academic medical center in New York City. Her unsentimental but moving memoir of her experiences bridges two distinct periods in the history of the epidemic: the terrifying early years in which a diagnosis was a death sentence and ignorance too often eclipsed compassion, and the introduction of antiviral therapies that transformed AIDS into a chronic, though potentially manageable, disease. Voices in the Band also provides a new perspective on how we understand disease and its treatment within the context of teamwork among medical personnel, government agencies and other sources of support, and patients.

Deftly bringing back both the fear and confusion that surrounded the disease in the early 1990s and the guarded hope that emerged at the end of the decade, Dr. Ball effectively portrays the grief and isolation felt by both the patients and those who cared for them using a sharp eye for detail and sensitivity to each patient's story. She also recounts the friendships, humor, and camaraderie that she and her colleagues shared working together to provide the best care possible, despite repeated frustrations and setbacks. As Dr. Ball and the team at CSS struggled to care for an underserved population even after game-changing medication was available, it became clear to them that medicine alone could not ensure a transition from illness to health when patients were suffering from terrible circumstances as well as a terrible disease.

Taking an unusual approach to the topic of medical teamwork, this book gathers fifty engaging first-person narratives provided by people from various health care professions.

Dr. Richard A. Deyo, proposes an approach to managing back pain, which most adults in the United States experience at some point, that empowers the individual and leads more directly to effective care.

This book shows how medical schools and teaching hospitals can implement the University of Toronto's successful model for interprofessional medical education, providing a step-by-step guide for deans, faculty, administrators, and health care providers.

Experts from the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands explore medical competency from different perspectives in order to spark thoughtful discussion and debate on the subject.

A play about workplace relations among physicians, nurses, others who work in health care, and patients—and how their interaction affects the quality of patient care, for better or worse.

Dan Zuberi looks at the consequences of outsourcing hospital cleaning and food preparation from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality.

The comprehensively revised and updated third edition of From Silence to Voice will help nurses construct messages using a range of traditional and new social media that accurately describe the true nature of their work.

Where Night Is Day is a nonfiction narrative grounded in the day-by-day, hour-by-hour rhythms of an ICU.

Beyond the Checklist argues that lives could be saved and patient care enhanced by adapting the relevant lessons of aviation safety and teamwork.

The first book to examine the arguments for and against mandated nurse-to-patient ratios, utilizing survey data, interviews, and other original research to focus on two case studies (California and the Australian state of Victoria).

In First, Do Less Harm, twelve health care professionals and researchers plus two former patients look at patient safety from a variety of perspectives, finding many of the proposed solutions to be inadequate or impractical.

Gordon describes the everyday work of three RNs in Boston—a nurse practitioner, an oncology nurse, and a clinical nurse specialist on a medical unit—providing a vivid, engaging, and intimate portrait of the importance of nurses in patients' lives.

This concise book chronicles the often turbulent history of screening mammography since its introduction in the early 1970s.

"Nursing, everyone believes, is the caring profession. Texts on caring line the walls of nursing schools and student shelves. Indeed, the discipline of nursing is often known as the 'caring science.' Because of their caring reputation, nurses top the...

In this book, Suzanne Gordon draws on in-depth interviews with nurses and other health care professionals, research studies, and extensive firsthand reporting to better understand the myriad causes of and possible solutions to the current nursing crisis.

When unions undertake labor organizing campaigns, they often do so from strong moral positions, contrasting workers' rights to decent pay or better working conditions with the more venal financial motives of management. But how does labor confront management when management itself has moral legitimacy? In With God on Our Side, Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California. Based on his own work as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Reich explores how both union leaders and hospital leaders sought to show they were upholding the Catholic "mission" of the hospital against a market represented by the other. Ultimately, workers and union leaders were able to reinterpret Catholic values in ways that supported their efforts to organize.

More generally, Reich argues that unions must weave together economic and cultural power in order to ensure their continued relevancy in the postindustrial world. In addition to advocating for workers' economic interests, unions must engage with workers' emotional investments in their work, must contend with the kind of moral authority that Santa Rosa Hospital leaders exerted to dissuade workers from organizing, and must connect labor's project to broader conceptions of the public good.

Understanding PTSD among today's veterans and how it is handled by the military and VA system.

How has France assure universal coverage while protecting patient and practitioner freedoms? What can Americans learn from the French experience, and what can the French learn from the U.S. example?

We are on the verge of the nation's worst nursing shortage in history. Dedicated nurses are leaving hospitals in droves, and there are not enough new recruits to the profession to meet demand. Even hospitals that were once very highly regarded for the...

Stacey draws on observations of and interviews with aides working in Ohio and California to explore the physical and emotional labor associated with the care of others.

The number of women practicing medicine in the United States has grown steadily since the late 1960s, with women now roughly at parity with men among entering medical students. Why did so many women enter American medicine? How are women faring...

In this book, leading physician-scientists and academic physicians examine the problem from a variety of perspectives: historical, demographic, scientific, cultural, sociological, and economic.

My Imaginary Illness is the compelling story of Atkins's decades-long battle with a disease deemed imaginary, her frustration with a succession of doctors and diagnoses and her excruciating physical and emotional journey back to wellness.

U.S. health care is a $2.5 trillion system that accounts for more than 17 percent of the nation's GDP. It is also highly susceptible to fraud. Estimates vary, but some observers believe that as much as 10 percent of all medical billing involves some type of fraud. In 2009, New York's Medicaid fraud office recovered $283 million and obtained 148 criminal convictions. In July 2010, the U.S. Justice Department charged nearly 100 patients, doctors, and health care executives in five states of bilking the Medicare system out of more than $251 million through false claims for services that were medically unnecessary or never provided. These cases only hint at the scope of the problem.

In Phantom Billing, Fake Prescriptions, and the High Cost of Medicine, Terry L. Leap takes on medical fraud and its economic, psychological, and social costs. Illustrated throughout with dozens of specific and often fascinating cases, this book covers a wide variety of crimes: kickbacks, illicit referrals, overcharging and double billing, upcoding, unbundling, rent-a-patient and pill-mill schemes, insurance scams, short-pilling, off-label marketing of pharmaceuticals, and rebate fraud, as well as criminal acts that enable this fraud (mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering). After assessing the effectiveness of the federal laws designed to fight health care fraud and abuse—the antikickback statute, the Stark Law, the False Claims Act, HIPAA, and the food and drug laws—Leap suggests a number of ways that health care providers, consumers, insurers, and federal and state officials can bring health care fraud and abuse under control, thereby reducing the overall cost of medical care in America.

Florence Nightingale and her place in nursing history and in contemporary nursing discourse is a topic of continuing interest for nursing students, teachers, and professional associations. This book offers new scholarship on her work and legacy.

Infectious disease is the most common cause of illness and death in Africa, yet health practitioners routinely fail to identify causative microorganisms in most patients. As a result, patients often do not receive the right medicine in time to cure them promptly even when such medicine is available, outbreaks are larger and more devastating than they should be, and the impact of control interventions is difficult to measure. Wrong prescriptions and prolonged infections amount to needless costs for patients and for health systems. In Divining without Seeds, Iruka N. Okeke forcefully argues that laboratory diagnostics are essential to the effective practice of medicine in Africa.

The diversity of endemic life-threatening infections and limited public health resources in tropical Africa make the need for basic laboratory diagnostic support even more acute than in other parts of the world. This book gathers compelling case studies of inadequate diagnoses of diseases ranging from fevers—including malaria—to respiratory infections and sexually transmitted diseases. The inherited and widely prevalent health clinic model, which excludes or diminishes the hospital laboratory, is flawed, to often devastating effect. Fortunately, there are new technologies that make it possible to inexpensively implement testing at the primary care level. Divining without Seeds makes clear that routine use of appropriate diagnostic support should be part of every drug delivery plan in Africa and that diagnostic development should be given high priority.

In this collection of first-person narratives, we meet RNs working at the bedside, providing home care, managing hospital departments, teaching and doing research, lobbying for quality patient care, and campaigning for health care reform.

Changing the Course of AIDS is an in-depth evaluation of a new and exciting way to create the kind of much-needed behavioral change that could affect the course of the global health crisis of HIV/AIDS. This case study from the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrates that regular workers serving as peer educators can be as—or even more—effective agents of behavioral change than experts who lecture about the facts and so-called appropriate health care behavior. After spending six years researching the response of large South African companies to the epidemic that is decimating their workforce as well as South African communities, David Dickinson describes the promise of this grassroots intervention—workers educating one another in the workplace and community—and the limitations of traditional top-down strategies.

Dickinson's book takes us right into the South African workplace to show how effective and yet enormously complex peer education really is. We see what it means when workers directly tackle the kinds of sexual, gender, religious, ethnic, and broader social and political taboos that make behavior change so difficult, particularly when that behavior involves sex and sexuality. Dickinson's findings show that people who are not officially health care experts or even health care workers can be skilled and effective educators. In this book we see why peer education has so much to offer societies grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and why those interested in changing behaviors to ameliorate other health problems like obesity, alcoholism, and substance abuse have so much to learn from the South African example.

"With Lous Heshusius as a guide, pain patients can learn much about the perils of a modern health-care odyssey."—David B. Morris

Kaiser Permanente is the largest managed care organization in the country. It also happens to have the largest and most complex labor-management partnership ever created in the United States. This book tells the story of that partnership-how it...

Aaron and Stella Alterra had been married for more than sixty years when Aaron began to notice puzzling lapses in his wife's memory. Innocuous at first, they became more severe and more alarming. After a series of appointments and tests, the Alterras were informed that Stella was one of the more than 4.5 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease.Combining medical research on the disease and often-painful anecdotes of memory loss, deteriorating motor functions, personality shifts, support-group and daycare experiences, and drug trials, Alterra chronicles his transformation from husband to caregiver after his wife's diagnosis.More than a chronology of one family's experience of Alzheimer's disease, The Caregiver is an intelligent, beautifully reflective testimony to how family members turned caregivers become the ultimate advocates for their loved ones in the face of a disease with no cure.

South African nurses care for patients in London, hospitals recruit Filipino nurses to Los Angeles, and Chinese nurses practice their profession in Ireland. In every industrialized country of the world, patients today increasingly find that the nurses...