Healthcare managers, professionals and service users operate in an increasingly complex environment in terms of policy, regulation and governance arrangements. The policy process is becoming pluralised as competing narratives are drawn upon to influence practice. A wide range of contradictory and inconsistent policies are on offer to healthcare stakeholders, which ultimately results in a broad …
Sustaining a healthy and productive work environment for employees with health issues and work disabilities or those returning to work after sick leave may present a challenge to employers. This publication offers unique insights into occupational health and rehabilitation, covering international perspectives as well as a variety of health-related disciplines. Policymakers, employers, employees…
The book shows readers exactly how to use Lean tools to design healthcare work that is smooth, efficient, error free and focused on patients and patient outcomes. It includes in-depth discussions of every important Lean tool, including value stream maps, takt time, spaghetti diagrams, workcell design, 5S, SMED, A3, Kanban, Kaizen and many more, all presented in the context of healthcare. For ex…
This book analyses the factors that influence the development and implementation of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) from multiple perspectives. It investigates the development of HTA activities in decentralized countries with a specific focus on the analysis of healthcare professionals’ perceptions. Although these perceptions are highly relevant in terms of implementing HTA processes, espe…
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This book introduces the Japanese urban food desert (FD). Currently, Japan has the most rapidly aging society in the world, with a shrinking population and food desert issues in connection with the isolation of the elderly people from their families and local communities. The types of food deserts that Japan is currently facing are likely to occur in many other countries under similar circumsta…
This book assembles many of the foremost writers and clinicians in the field of team-based primary care to share their own relational reflections. It features narratives from fields such as integrated behavioral health, integrated primary care, primary care behavioral health, medical family therapy, health psychology, primary care psychology, and clinical social work. The key focus of the chapt…
This book examines family interactions and relationships during the transition to parenthood. It offers a unique integration of different lines of research on prenatal family dynamics contributed by leading family researchers in North America and Europe who use observational approaches to study emergent family processes. The book explores prenatal dynamics in diverse families, including adolesc…
This book explores international perspectives on quality improvement within the field of early childhood education and care. Many countries and governments are focusing on preschool quality as a way to improve entrenched inequalities and reduce social disadvantage and segregation: this book draws together various global case studies to showcase how different countries tackle aspects of quality …
This book explores the phenomenon of researchers at risk: that is, the experiences of scholars whose research topics require them to engage with diverse kind of dangers, uncertainties or vulnerabilities. This risk may derive from working with variously marginalised individuals or groups, or from being members of such groups themselves. At other times, the risk relates to particular economic or …
This book presents a systemic perspective on the broadly perceived problem of social care, meant in terms of a network engaging balanced resources and actors to assure the functionality, in an integrative approach. The approach involves individual, institutional and organizational structures, at the micro, mezzo- and macro-levels, in their interrelations, with proper contexts for understandings…
Services are key activities in the globalization of the economy and also underlie the quality of life of local residents. The advanced work presented in this book was selected from the proceedings of the First International Conference on Serviceology (ICServ2013), held October 16–18, 2013 in Tokyo. This book provides a useful overall guide to the state of the art in theory and practice of ser…