Moves beyond traditional definitions of patient-centered care to improve the experience of a "real person" as patient How might the entire system for producing, delivering, and paying for health care be changed so that real people fare better than they currently do? This text applies "person-focused" principles to health management decision-making aimed at improving the personal experience of care within health care institutions to improve outcomes and cost savings. Written and edited by distinguished educators and researchers with decades of health care policy experience, the text examines how health care managers can initiate and direct the process of system transformation by understanding and using a greater "person-focus" in their decision-making. It encompasses the key domains of management competencies defined by the AUPHA, CAHME, and NCHL. The text brings together experts across a variety of health care management disciplines to examine how managerial decisions affect the personal experience of patient care. It is based on observations that many of the current problems facing health care managers are caused by lack of attention to what happens when real people are transformed into "patients" and treated routinely by the US health care system. Moving beyond traditional definitions of patient-centered care, the book explores how our entire system for producing, delivering, and paying for care can be changed so that the internal experience of people receiving care is a positive one. The book helps to develop specific rules for improving the experience of care through better managerial decision-making. Case studies with discussion questions facilitate creative problem solving based on sound decision-making. Also included are extensive links to online content along with an Instructor's Manual, PowerPoint slides and more. Key Features: Describes how the person-focused model leads to better outcomes Discusses the impact of management decisions on the personal experience of clinical care Addresses the personal and clinical problems created through our current system's standard health care delivery and financing Applies basic principles of management decision-making to key operational issues to improve the personal experience of care Fulfills key learning competencies defined by AUPHA, CAHME, and NCHL

An evidence-based analysis of the opportunities and challenges of moving towards more person-centred health systems.

Introduction to Health Care Management, Fourth Edition is a concise, reader-friendly, introductory healthcare management text that covers a wide variety of healthcare settings, from hospitals to nursing homes and clinics. Filled with examples to engage the reader's imagination, the important issues in healthcare management, such as ethics, cost management, strategic planning and marketing, information technology, and human resources, are all thoroughly covered. Guidelines and rubrics along with numerous case studies make this text both student-friendly and teacher-friendly. It is the perfect resource for students of healthcare management, nursing, allied health, business administration, pharmacy, occupational therapy, public administration, and public health.

While the benefits of Person-Centered Care (PCC) to both caregivers and care-receivers are significant, development and implementation can be undermined by unsupportive or absent documentation. A timely response to emerging needs in long-term care, this innovative and practical toolkit provides expert guidance as well as specific policy and workforce documents that assist healthcare professionals to advance and sustain a PCC philosophy in their care community. Person-Centered Care: A Policies & Workforce Toolkit for Long-Term Care Settings delivers an overview of PCC, educates organizational stakeholders on core concepts, presents policies and procedures in the advancement of PCC, and describes the essential function of job descriptions as related to recruitment, new team member selection, orientation, supervision and performance management. Delivers step-by-step guidance for developing, implementing, and managing PCC policies in long-term care communities Provides ready-to-use, adaptable documents to establish an organizational foundation for PCC Offers practical suggestions, real-life examples, and field-tested directives for PCC Prevents imprecise, outdated and conflicting policies and procedures that can lead to penalties or loss of certification Includes a complete collection of PCC policies and job descriptions accessed in the appendix and online Written by leading experts in the field, Person-Centered Care: A Policies & Workforce Toolkit for Long-Term Care Settings is an invaluable resource for any long-term care provider seeking to reach their goals of implementing and sustaining person-centered care.

This forward-looking volume challenges professionals and interested lay readers to reconsider our ways of looking at health and wellness, illness and disease, and the goals of health/healthcare systems. Reframing health systems as complex adaptive systems, the book identifies health care as a central aspect of social care and security for all people, particularly the most vulnerable. From there, the author outlines necessary organizational, design, medical, and community steps toward building health systems that view and practice health care as a human right and can produce optimum care in the long term. And extensive illustrations display effective collaborative problem solving within these systems, in both intriguing theoretical models and the real world. Highlights of the coverage: · Systems and complexity thinking in health and health care · Redesign based on “first principles” · Redesign from an organizational perspective · Working together effectively and efficiently to achieve a common purpose · Analyzing “the workings” of health systems as complex adaptive systems · Person-centered, equitable, and sustainable health systems: achieving the goal Health System Redesign brings a voice and a vision to the most pressing problems in healthcare service delivery, and offers new goals and purpose to health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, clinicians, and concerned members of the local community

The winner of the prestigious Walt Whitman award for her book "The Hocus Pocus of the Universe" completed her second book of poetry "The Weight of a Soul" while living in Fairhope, Alabama, just before her death. It reflects the values she embraced while working as a registered nurse.

The evidence is undeniable. By any measure, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, yet its health outcomes as measure by longevity are in the bottom half among developed countries, and its health-related quality of life has remained constant or declined since 1998. In addition to high costs and lower than expected outcomes, the healthcare delivery system is plagues by treatment delays as it can take weeks to see a specialist, and many people have limited or no access to care. Part of the challenge is that the healthcare delivery system is a large, complex, and sophisticated value creation chain. Successfully changing this highly interconnected system is difficult and time consuming because the underlying problems are hard to comprehend, the root causes are many, the solution is unclear, and the relationships among problems, causes, and solution are multifaceted. To address these issues, the book carefully explains the underlying problems, examines their root causes using information, data, and logic, and presents a comprehensive and integrated solution that addresses these causes. These three steps are the methodological backbone of this book. A solution depends on understanding and applying the principles of patient-centered care (PCC) and resource management. PCC puts patients, supported by their primary care physicians, back in the role as decision makers and depends on patients being responsible for their health including making good life-style choices. After all, the best way to reduce healthcare costs and increase quality of life is to improve our health and wellness and as a result need less care. In addition, health insurance must be rethought and redesigned so it is less likely to lead to overuse. For many people with health insurance, the out-of-pocket cost of healthcare are small, so healthcare decision making is often biased toward consumption. Effective resource management means that healthcare providers must do a better job of acquiring and using resources in order to provide care quickly, productively, and correctly. This means improving healthcare strategy and management, accelerating the use of information technology, making drug costs affordable and fair, reducing the incidence of malpractice, and rebuilding the provider network. In addition, implementation is difficult because there are many participants in the healthcare delivery value chain, such as physicians, nurses, and medical technicians, as well as many provider organizations, such as hospitals, clinics, physician offices, and labs. Further up the value chain there are pharmaceutical companies, equipment providers, and other suppliers. These participants have diverse and sometimes conflicting goals, but each must be willing to accept change and work in a coordinated manner to improve healthcare. To overcome these problems, strong national leadership is needed to get the attention and support from the people and organizations involved in healthcare and to make the comprehensive changes that will lower healthcare costs, improve healthcare quality, eliminate delays, increase access, and enhance patient satisfaction.