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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.

Every day people decide what to eat, how to educate their children, where to find health care, and how to connect to others. For many, freely choosing a lifestyle defines the American dream. But in the 21st century, these choices are increasingly constructed by corporations and designed not to promote well-being, happiness, and planetary health, but to increase corporate profits and power. As a result, the decisions that corporations encourage individuals to make can lead to premature death, illness, or psychological distress as well as environmental pollution and social conflict. At What Cost: Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health maps the landscape of the changing role of capitalism in shaping health in America, documenting the human costs of the dominant political and economic system. It describes how globalization, financial speculation, monopoly concentration, and business control of science and technology have enhanced the ability of corporations and their allies to overwhelm influences of government, family, and community. It analyses how 21st-century capitalism structures the choices that affect the well-being of individuals, families, communities, and the planet. The book also explores how people, governments, civil society, and social movements are challenging corporate domination and forging alternative paths to a healthier, more sustainable world. While other books have explored pieces of this story, At What Cost offers a comprehensive analysis of the health consequences of modern capitalism. It provides citizens, parents, activists, scholars, and policy makers with the evidence they need to construct a better world for current and future generations.

This book provides a penetrating historical analysis of why countless studies show that Americans are far less healthy than their European counterparts. The book 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. This book compares the United States 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, the book draws on history to find answers to our most nettlesome health policy questions.

Closing Death’s Door explores innovative legal strategies to address the challenge of medical error. In the United States today, several hundred thousand patients die in hospitals each year because of errors in medical treatment—the nation’s third leading cause of death. The legal mechanism designed to deal with this epidemic of injury and death is the medical malpractice system. It has failed to stem the tide of iatrogenic harm. Among the reasons are the costliness of the malpractice system, its availability to only a minuscule percentage of those harmed, and decades of “tort reform” efforts that have effectively extinguished the system for all but the most egregious claims. In 1999, in To Err Is Human, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) sounded an alarm about the toll taken by medical error. Its proposed solution—a set of reporting systems to document problems and generate data on which solutions might be based—has been a failure. The time has come for a fresh look at what the law might do to contribute to patient safety. To begin a conversation about legal innovations designed to spur healthcare system improvements directed at reducing harmful medical errors, this book explores a number of possible steps, including well-designed economic incentives to stimulate greater investment in safety; promotion of systems approaches to safer delivery of care; government regulation and surveillance in especially risky treatment contexts; and encouragement of a range of technological improvements, especially involving information technology.

In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. Racism, marginalization, socioeconomic inequality—the failure to address these forces left America vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became. This book articulates the foundational forces shaping health in American society and how they can be strengthened to prevent the next outbreak from becoming a pandemic. Because while no one could have predicted that a pandemic would strike when it did, we did know that a pandemic would strike, sooner or later. The book challenges Americans to tackle the deep-rooted obstacles preventing them from becoming a truly vibrant and equitable nation, reminding them of what they seemed to have forgotten: that health is a public good worth protecting.

This book employs the ecosocial theory of disease distribution to combine critical political and economic analysis with a deep engagement with biology, in societal, ecological, and historical context. It illuminates what embodying (in)justice entails and the embodied truths revealed by population patterns of health. Chapter 1 explains ecosocial theory and its focus on multilevel spatiotemporal processes of embodying (in)justice, across the lifecourse and historical generations, as shaped by the political economy and political ecology of the societies in which people live. The counter is to dominant narratives that attribute primary causal agency to people’s allegedly innate biology and their allegedly individual (and decontextualized) health behaviors. Chapter 2 discusses application of ecosocial theory to analyze: the health impacts of Jim Crow and its legal abolition; racialized and economic breast cancer inequities; the joint health impacts of physical and social hazards at work (including racism, sexism, and heterosexism) and relationship hazards (involving unsafe sex and violence); and measures of structural injustice. Chapter 3 explores embodied truths and health justice, in relation to: police violence; climate change; fossil fuel extraction and sexually transmitted infectious disease: health benefits of organic food—for whom? ; public monuments, symbols, and the people’s health; and light, vision, and the health of people and other species. The objective is to inform critical and practical research, actions, and alliances to advance health equity—and to strengthen the people’s health—in a deeply troubled world on a threatened planet.

This book will be of interest to public health professionals from various public health disciplines, bioethicists, legal scholars, and members of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and health advocacy organizations. It will be an invaluable resource for the thousands of Master of Public Health students across the world. It also aims to make students, epidemiologists, and health professionals aware of situations that require moral reflection, judgment, or decision, while pointing to ways in which justified moral conclusions can be reached. The book will also be of use to persons interested more broadly in bioethics and health policy. It will include the foundations, key values and principles, methods, and issues related to ethics and epidemiology.

This book explores the history of health care in postcolonial state-making and the fragmentation of the health system in Syria during the conflict. It analyzes the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) in enabling attacks on health facilities and distinguishes the differences between humanitarian solutions and refugee populations’ expectations. It also describes the way in which humanitarian actors have fed the war economy. The book highlights the lived experience of siege in all its layers. It examines how humanitarian actors have become part of the information wars that have raged throughout the past ten years and how they have chosen to position themselves in the face of grave violations of IHL.

We can’t get healthcare without computers. This book shows that digital healthcare is riskier than you thought. Until digital healthcare improves, digital risk means that patients will be harmed unnecessarily, and healthcare staff will continue to be blamed for problems when it’s not their fault. This book tells stories of widespread problems with digital healthcare. The stories inspire and challenge anyone who wants to make hospitals and healthcare better. The stories and their resolutions will empower patients, clinical staff and digital developers to help transform digital healthcare to make it safer and more effective. This book is not just about the many problems that affect digital healthcare. More importantly, it’s about the solutions that can make digital healthcare much safer. It’s baffling that these solutions are not universally required, as our health and all our lives depend on them.

What has called so many young people to the field of global health is the passion to be a force for change, to work on the positive side of globalization, and to be part of a movement for human rights. This passion stems from the knowledge that the world is not OK. Impoverished people are suffering and dying from treatable diseases, while the wealthy live well into their 80s and 90s. These disparities exist between and within countries. COVID-19 has further demonstrated the need for global equity and our mutual interdependence. Yet the road to health equity is long. People living in countries and communities marred by slavery, colonialism, resource extraction, and neoliberal market policies have markedly less access to health care than the wealthy. Developing equitable health systems requires understanding the history and political economy of communities and countries and working to adequately resource health delivery. Equitable health care also requires strong advocacy for the right to health. In fact, the current era in global health was sparked by advocacy—the activist movement for AIDS treatment access, for the universality of the right to health and to a share of scientific advancement. The same advocacy is needed now as vaccines and treatments are developed for COVID-19. This book centers global health in principles of equity and social justice and positions global health as a field to fulfill the universal right to health.

This book tells the story of the author's decision to donate a kidney to a stranger. The book 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. The story is also placed in the larger context of the history of kidney transplantation and the ethical controversies that surround living donors. The book helps readers understand the discoveries that made transplantation relatively safe and effective as well as the legal, ethical, and economic policies that make it feasible. The book explores the steps involved in recovering and allocating organs. It analyzes the differences that arise depending on whether the organ comes from a living donor or one who has died. It observes the expertise — and the shortcomings — of doctors, nurses, and other professionals and describes the burdens that we place on people who are willing to donate. It asks us to consider just how far society should go in using one person's healthy body parts in order to save another person. The book provides an account of organ donation that is both personal and analytical. A combination of perspectives leads to a profound and compelling exploration of a largely opaque practice. The book pulls back the curtain to offer readers a more transparent view of the fascinating world of organ donation.

Pornography and Public Health explores the scientific evidence that helps answer the question: “Is sexually explicit media causing epidemic harm to human health?” It situates this question in the context of historical concerns that sex and sexuality have the power to radicalize people and legal cases that have defined obscenity in the United States. It reveals how pornography came to be considered a public health crisis in multiple US states despite a lack of support and involvement of any governmental public health agency. It also reviews peer-reviewed scientific findings that address whether pornography contributes to epidemics of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, the dissolution of intimate relationships, eating disorders and body dissatisfaction, and compulsive use. Further, it discusses working conditions for pornography performers and outlines possible methods for improving them. It suggests that public health frameworks and tools can be applied meaningfully to analyses of pornography’s impact on health. This title is written for emerging public health advocates.

Doctors are still trained to practise to a deficit model of medicine. This book proposes an abundance model that takes the best of health and wellbeing practices, and considers all four aspects of the individual—physical and mental, emotional and spiritual. In Positive Medicine, Beaumont’s disruptive approach takes up the challenge posed by Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis nearly fifty years ago. He proposes a new relationship between people and their doctors, fostering self-efficacy so that people can be empowered to manage their own health and live happier, healthier lives.

Training and supervision have been cited as integral aspects to well-functioning community health worker (CHW) programmes. However, to date no books have focused on addressing this specific topic. This edited volume brings together a range of viewpoints from world leading practitioners and academics in CHW training, education, and supervision from different geographic regions. It explores the themes of supervision, technology support for training, participatory design, ethics and programme evaluation. The book aims to provide a comprehensive and multifaceted overview of the current state of this emerging field and to identify gaps in research and practice in this key area of global health.