Hospital performance in Brazil

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Ken Wright, Alan Haycox, Ian Leedham

The aim of this book is to describe and discuss the principles of evaluating community care services for people with learning difficulties and to explore how they have been applied in the development of policy in the last ten years. Although the contents are based heavily upon the theory and practice of micro-economic appraisal of health and social care, other social science disciplines are exploited wherever relevant. No prior knowledge of any of these disciplines is expected. The coverage of the book follows the logical steps in policy evaluation including an explanation of different approaches to evaluation, a discussion of recent policy objectives, the measurement of outcomes and costs and the policy implications of recent evaluative studies. The book concludes with an examination of the relevance of evaluative studies to the new arrangements for community care of people with learning difficulties.

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Amy Hoffman

Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Hoffman neither idealizes nor deifies Riegle, whom she portrays as a brilliant man, devoted prison rights activist, and very difficult friend.

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Peter Pronovost and Eric Vohr

While Americans spend more on health care than any other country in the western world, our hospitals and clinics kill more patients. Patient safety expert Dr. Peter Pronovost is working to remedy that, by changing the way hospitals and doctors function day to day. In fact, his ideas are already saving people. By introducing a five-step checklist that standardizes a common ICU procedure, Dr. Pronovost has decreased the rate of infection--and as a result, unnecessary deaths--across the country by 90 percent. In this book, Dr. Pronovost makes reform relatable, easy to understand, and inspiring.--From publisher description.

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Ross Koppel and Suzanne Gordon

Each year, hospital-acquired infections, prescribing and treatment errors, lost documents and test reports, communication failures, and other problems have caused thousands of deaths in the United States, added millions of days to patients' hospital stays, and cost Americans tens of billions of dollars. Despite (and sometimes because of) new medical information technology and numerous well-intentioned initiatives to address these problems, threats to patient safety remain, and in some areas are on the rise. In First, Do Less Harm, twelve health care professionals and researchers plus two former patients look at patient safety from a variety of perspectives, finding many of the proposed solutions to be inadequate or impractical. Several contributors to this book attribute the failure to confront patient safety concerns to the influence of the "market model" on medicine and emphasize the need for hospital-wide teamwork and greater involvement from frontline workers (from janitors and aides to nurses and physicians) in planning, implementing, and evaluating effective safety initiatives.