Description
Book SynopsisNo single discipline can provide a full account of why health care is the way it is. Introducing an accessible overview of health services and drawing on medicine, sociology, economics, history and epidemiology, this book provides a series of conceptual frameworks which help to clarify some of the complexity that confronts the inexperienced observer.
Helping to determine what influences and shapes health services, it also examines some of the key processes involved in providing healthcare, considering three levels: individual patients, health care organizations such as hospitals, and regional or national institutions such as governments.
This second edition has been updated to include recent developments and further examples and activities from low, middle and high income countries.
The book examines:
â how medical knowledge, staff, patients and finance shape health services
â what factors influence utilization of health services
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Table of Contents
Section 1: Introduction
1 A systems approach to health services
2 Formal and lay care
Section 2: Inputs to health care
3 Diseases and medical knowledge
4 Medical paradigms
5 Health care professionals
6 Funding health care
Section 3: Processes of health care
7 Need, demand and use
8 Users of health care
9 Paying providers
Section 4: Outcomes and quality of health care
10 Quality of health services
11 Defining quality
12 Quality assessment
13 Quality improvement
