Supporting Children and Families gathers together the lessons learned from perhaps the largest scale social experiment ever undertaken in England - Sure Start, the programme designed to improve the emotional development, health and education of children.It boils down the huge amount of knowledge and experience generated by the Sure Start programmes and local evaluation studies, with chapters encompassing child development and healthcare, partnership working with existing local serv...

The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand—a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades—delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery.In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments...

If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the information they need about a drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication...

"Insightful and filled with verve...electrifying."—Wall Street JournalHailed as "an astute book of enormous importance" (Sherwin Nuland), The Surgeons follows the team at one of the world's premier cardiac surgery and transplant centers. Given unprecedented access, Charles R. Morris recounts in thrilling detail a late-night against-the-clock "harvest run" to secure a precious transplantable organ, the heartbreaking story of a child's failed transplant, and more. A...

Every year, the average American spends about $7,300 on medical expenses. The typical Canadian pays $2,700, the Briton only $2,000. And yet, according to the World Health Organization, our healthcare system, in terms of total quality, ranks thirty-eighth in the world, right between Costa Rica and Slovenia. Not only do 40 million Americans lack health insurance, but more than 200,000 die each year because of medical mistakes. Our average life expectancy is lower than Cuba's. In Next Med...

On July 12, 1966, the Medical Care Insurance Act was passed by the federal House of Commons after a ferocious public debate that pitted the vast majority of Canadians against a powerful alliance of business, insurance companies, and doctors.More than thirty years later, the same battle is being fought all over again. Only now, the forces opposed to medicare are more ideologically unified, more richly endowed, and tied to transnational corporations whose power exceeds that of entire...

In no other country has health care served as such a volatile flashpoint of ideological conflict. America has endured a century of rancorous debate on health insurance, and despite the passage of legislation in 2010, the battle is not yet over. This book is a history of how and why the United States became so stubbornly different in health care, presented by an expert with unsurpassed knowledge of the issues. Tracing health-care reform from its beginnings to its current uncertain prospects, P...

A primer in plain English that explains how health insurance will work under the new legislation and how it will affect your care and your choices going forward.Now that "Obamacare" (as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is popularly known) has become the law of the land, millions of Americans will need help figuring out exactly how the new system will work and how it might affect their lives.This guide will teach people how the new health care ex...

A Healthy Society, Updated and Expanded Edition, is one doctor’s vision for a new approach to politics – and a new approach to building a healthier world. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician, Dr. Meili argues that health delivery too often focuses on treatment of immediate causes and ignores more fundamental conditions that lead to poor health. The social determinants of health – income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports – have...

Canada has been among the world leaders in recognizing the multiple factors that impact health. Focusing on Canada’s health care system, Raisa B. Deber provides brief descriptions of some key facts and concepts necessary to understand health care policy in Canada and place it in an international context.An accessible guide, Treating Health Care unpacks key concepts to provide informed discussions that help us understand and diagnose Canada’s health care system and to clari...

Societies make decisions and take actions that profoundly impact the distribution of health. Why and how should collective choices be made, and policies implemented, to address health inequalities under conditions of resource scarcity? How should societies conceptualize and measure health disparities, and determine whether they've been adequately addressed? Who is responsible for various aspects of this important social problem? In Health and Social Justice, Jennifer Prah Ruger el...

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.Dranove offers pragmatic remedies, some of them...