Health care is under tremendous pressure regarding efficiency, safety, and economic viability. It has responded by adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability - although with limited, and all-too-often disappointing, results. The Resilient Health Care Network (RHCN) has worked since 2011 to facilitate the interaction and collaboration among practitioners and researchers interested in applying concepts from resilience engineering to health care and patient safety. This has met with considerable success, not least because the focus from the start was on developing concrete ways to complement a Safety-I perspective with a Safety-II perspective. Building on previous volumes, Delivering Resilient Health Care presents documented experiences and practical guidance on how to bring Resilient Health Care into practice. It provides concrete advice on how to prepare a study, how to choose the right data, how to collect it, how to analyse the data, and how to interpret the results. This fourth book in the Resilient Healthcare series contains contributions from international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. This book provides a practical guide for delivering resilient healthcare, particularly for clinicians on the frontline of care unsure how to incorporate resilience into their everyday work, managers coordinating care, and for policymakers hoping to steer the system in the right direction. Other groups - patients, the media, and researchers - will also find much of interest here.

This book is the 3rd volume in the Resilient Health Care series. Resilient health care is a product of both the policy and managerial efforts to organize, fund and improve services, and the clinical care which is delivered directly to patients. This volume continues the lines of thought in the first two books. Where the first volume provided the rationale and basic concepts of RHC and the second teased out the everyday clinical activities which adjust and vary to create safe care, this book will look more closely at the connections between the sharp and blunt ends. Doing so will break new ground, since the systematic study in patient safety to date with few exceptions has been limited.

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability. This has on the whole been met with limited success because health care as a non-trivial and multifaceted system differs significantly from most traditional industries. In order to allow health care systems to perform as expected and required, it is necessary to have concepts and methods that are able to cope with this complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capacity because its focus is on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. Resilience engineering’s unique approach emphasises the usefulness of performance variability, and that successes and failures have the same aetiology. This book contains contributions from acknowledged international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce or eliminate the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase and improve the number of things that go right. Just as the WHO argues that health is more than the absence of illness, so does Resilient Health Care argue that safety is more than the absence of risk and accidents. This can be achieved by making use of the concrete experiences of resilience engineering, both conceptually (ways of thinking) and practically (ways of acting).

The book demonstrates how Resilient Health Care principles can enable those on the frontline to work more effectively towards interdisciplinary care by gaining a deeper understanding of the boundaries that exist in everyday clinical settings. This is done by presenting a set of case studies, theoretical chapters and applications that relate experiences, bring forth ideas and illustrate practical solutions. The chapters address many different issues such as resolving conflict, overcoming barriers to patient-flow management, and building connections through negotiation. They represent a range of approaches, rather than a single way of solving the practical problems, and have been written to serve both a scientific and an andragogical purpose. Working Across Boundaries is primarily aimed at people who are directly involved in the running and improvement of health care systems, providing them with practical guidance. It will also be of direct interest to health care professionals in clinical and managerial positions as well as researchers. Presents the latest work of the lauded Resilient Health Care Net group, developing applications of Resilience Engineering to health care, furthering safety thinking and generating applicable solutions that will benefit patient safety worldwide Enables health care professionals to become aware of the boundaries that affect their work so that they are able to use their strengths and overcome their weaknesses Written from a Safety-II perspective, where the purpose is to make sure that as much as possible goes well and the focus therefore is on everyday work rather than on failures. There are at present no other books that adopt this perspective nor which go into the practical details Provides a concise presentation of the state of resilient health care as a science, in terms of major theoretical issues and practical methods and techniques on the overarching and important topics of boundary-crossing and integration of care settings

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability. This has on the whole been met with limited success because health care as a non-trivial and multifaceted system differs significantly from most traditional industries. In order to allow health care systems to perform as expected and required, it is necessary to have concepts and methods that are able to cope with this complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capacity because its focus is on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. Resilience engineering’s unique approach emphasises the usefulness of performance variability, and that successes and failures have the same aetiology. This book contains contributions from acknowledged international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce or eliminate the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase and improve the number of things that go right. Just as the WHO argues that health is more than the absence of illness, so does Resilient Health Care argue that safety is more than the absence of risk and accidents. This can be achieved by making use of the concrete experiences of resilience engineering, both conceptually (ways of thinking) and practically (ways of acting).

In the devastation that follows a major disaster, there is a need for multiple sectors to unite and devote new resources to support the rebuilding of infrastructure, the provision of health and social services, the restoration of care delivery systems, and other critical recovery needs. In some cases, billions of dollars from public, private and charitable sources are invested to help communities recover. National rhetoric often characterizes these efforts as a "return to normal." But for many American communities, pre-disaster conditions are far from optimal. Large segments of the U.S. population suffer from preventable health problems, experience inequitable access to services, and rely on overburdened health systems. A return to pre-event conditions in such cases may be short-sighted given the high costs - both economic and social - of poor health. Instead, it is important to understand that the disaster recovery process offers a series of unique and valuable opportunities to improve on the status quo. Capitalizing on these opportunities can advance the long-term health, resilience, and sustainability of communities - thereby better preparing them for future challenges. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters identifies and recommends recovery practices and novel programs most likely to impact overall community public health and contribute to resiliency for future incidents. This book makes the case that disaster recovery should be guided by a healthy community vision, where health considerations are integrated into all aspects of recovery planning before and after a disaster, and funding streams are leveraged in a coordinated manner and applied to health improvement priorities in order to meet human recovery needs and create healthy built and natural environments. The conceptual framework presented in Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters lays the groundwork to achieve this goal and provides operational guidance for multiple sectors involved in community planning and disaster recovery. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters calls for actions at multiple levels to facilitate recovery strategies that optimize community health. With a shared healthy community vision, strategic planning that prioritizes health, and coordinated implementation, disaster recovery can result in a communities that are healthier, more livable places for current and future generations to grow and thrive - communities that are better prepared for future adversities.

This accessible textbook introduces a wide spectrum of ideas, approaches, and examples that make up the emerging field of implementation science, including implementation theory, processes and methods, data collection and analysis, brokering interest on the ground, and sustainable implementation. Containing over 60 concise essays, each addressing the thorny problem of how we can make care more evidence-informed, this book looks at how implementation science should be defined, how it can be conducted, and how it is assessed. It offers vital insight into how research findings that are derived from healthcare contexts can help make sense of service delivery and patient encounters. Each entry concentrates on an important concept and examines the idea’s evidence base, root causes and effects, ideas and applications, and methodologies and methods. Revealing a very human side to caregiving, but also tackling its more complex and technological aspects, the contributors draw on real-life healthcare examples to look both at why things go right in introducing a new intervention and at what can go wrong. Implementation Science: The Key Concepts provides a toolbox of rich, contemporary thought from leading international thinkers, clearly and succinctly delivered. This comprehensive and enlightening range of ideas and examples brought together in one place is essential reading for all students, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in translating knowledge into practice in healthcare.