First, Do Less Harm

First, Do Less Harm PDF Author: Ross Koppel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464072
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
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. Several chapters in First, Do Less Harm focus on the critical role of interprofessional and occupational practice in patient safety. Rather than focusing on the usual suspects-physicians, safety champions, or high level management-these chapters expand the list of "stakeholders" and patient safety advocates to include nurses, patient care assistants, and other staff, as well as the health care unions that may represent them. First, Do Less Harm also highlights workplace issues that negatively affect safety: including sleeplessness, excessive workloads, outsourcing of hospital cleaning, and lack of teamwork between physicians and other health care staff. In two chapters, experts explain why the promise of health care information technology to fix safety problems remains unrealized, with examples that are at once humorous and frightening. A book that will be required reading for physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, public health officers, quality and risk managers, healthcare educators, economists, and policymakers, First, Do Less Harm concludes with a list of twenty-seven paradoxes and challenges facing everyone interested in making care safe for both patients and those who care for them.

First, Do Less Harm

First, Do Less Harm PDF Author: Ross Koppel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464072
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
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. Several chapters in First, Do Less Harm focus on the critical role of interprofessional and occupational practice in patient safety. Rather than focusing on the usual suspects-physicians, safety champions, or high level management-these chapters expand the list of "stakeholders" and patient safety advocates to include nurses, patient care assistants, and other staff, as well as the health care unions that may represent them. First, Do Less Harm also highlights workplace issues that negatively affect safety: including sleeplessness, excessive workloads, outsourcing of hospital cleaning, and lack of teamwork between physicians and other health care staff. In two chapters, experts explain why the promise of health care information technology to fix safety problems remains unrealized, with examples that are at once humorous and frightening. A book that will be required reading for physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, public health officers, quality and risk managers, healthcare educators, economists, and policymakers, First, Do Less Harm concludes with a list of twenty-seven paradoxes and challenges facing everyone interested in making care safe for both patients and those who care for them.

First, Do No Harm

First, Do No Harm PDF Author: Lisa Belkin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982173394
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“Crammed with provocative insights, raw emotion, and heartbreaking dilemmas,” (The New York Times) First, Do No Harm is a powerful examination of how life and death decisions are made at a major metropolitan hospital in Houston, as told through the stories of doctors, patients, families, and hospital administrators facing unthinkable choices. What is life worth? And when is a life worth living? Journalist Lisa Belkin examines how these questions are asked and answered over one dramatic summer at Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas. In an account that is fascinating, revealing, and almost novelistic in its immediacy, Belkin takes us inside a major hospital and introduces us to the people who must make life and death decisions every day. As we walk through the hallways of the hospital we meet a young pediatrician who must decide whether to perform a risky last-ditch surgery on a teenager who has spent most of his fifteen years in a hospital; we watch as new parents battle with doctors over whether to disconnect their fragile, premature twins from the machine that keeps them breathing; we are in the operating room as a poor immigrant, paralyzed from a gunshot in the neck, is asked by doctors whether or not he wishes to stay alive; we witness the worry of a kidney specialist as he decides whether or not to transfer an uninsured baby to the county hospital down the road. We experience critical moments in the lives of these real people as Belkin explores challenging issues and questions involving medical ethics, human suffering, modern technology, legal liability, and financial reality. As medical technology advances, the choices grow more complicated. How far should we go to save a life? Who decides? And who pays?

First Do No Self Harm

First Do No Self Harm PDF Author: Charles Figley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199314292
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Keeping doctors happy and productive requires a thorough understanding of the systemic causes and consequences of physician stress, as well as the role of resilience in maintaining a healthy mental state. The pressure of making life-or-death decisions along with those associated with the day-to-day challenges of doctoring can lead to poor patient care and communication, patient dissatisfaction, absenteeism, reductions in productivity, job dissatisfaction, and lowered retention. This edited volume will provide a comprehensive tool for understanding and promoting physician stress resilience. Specifically, the book has six interrelated objectives that, collectively, would advance the evidence-based understanding of (1) the extent to which physicians experience and suffer from work-related stress; (2) the various manifestations, syndromes, and reaction patterns directly caused by work-related stress; (3) the degree to which physicians are resilient in that they are successful or not successful in coping with these stressors; (4) the theories and direct evidence that account for the resilience; (5) the programs during and following medical school which help to promote resilience; and (6) the agenda for future theory, research, and intervention efforts for the next generation of physicians.

First, Do No Harm

First, Do No Harm PDF Author: Nancy L. Diekelmann
Publisher: Interpretive Studies in Health
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The contributors to this volume show how healthcare professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent holistic healthcare, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients.

How We Do Harm

How We Do Harm PDF Author: Otis Webb Brawley, MD
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429941502
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
A startling and important exposé on the state of medicine, research, and healthcare today by the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the American Cancer Society How We Do Harm exposes the underbelly of healthcare today—the overtreatment of the rich, the under treatment of the poor, the financial conflicts of interest that determine the care that physicians' provide, insurance companies that don't demand the best (or even the least expensive) care, and pharmaceutical companies concerned with selling drugs, regardless of whether they improve health or do harm. Dr. Otis Brawley is the chief medical and scientific officer of The American Cancer Society, an oncologist with a dazzling clinical, research, and policy career. How We Do Harm pulls back the curtain on how medicine is really practiced in America. Brawley tells of doctors who select treatment based on payment they will receive, rather than on demonstrated scientific results; hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that seek out patients to treat even if they are not actually ill (but as long as their insurance will pay); a public primed to swallow the latest pill, no matter the cost; and rising healthcare costs for unnecessary—and often unproven—treatments that we all pay for. Brawley calls for rational healthcare, healthcare drawn from results-based, scientifically justifiable treatments, and not just the peddling of hot new drugs. Brawley's personal history – from a childhood in the gang-ridden streets of black Detroit, to the green hallways of Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest public hospital in the U.S., to the boardrooms of The American Cancer Society—results in a passionate view of medicine and the politics of illness in America - and a deep understanding of healthcare today. How We Do Harm is his well-reasoned manifesto for change.

On Epidemics

On Epidemics PDF Author: Hippocrates
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
"On Epidemics" by Hippocrates (translated by Francis Adams). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

First Do No Harm

First Do No Harm PDF Author: Adrienne Harris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135842957
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
At the outset of World War I - the "Great War" - Freud supported the Austro-Hungarian Empire for which his sons fought. But the cruel truths of that bloody conflict, wrought on the psyches as much as the bodies of the soldiers returning from the battlefield, caused him to rethink his stance and subsequently affected his theory: Psychoanalysis, a healing science, could tell us much about both the drive for war and the ways to undo the trauma that war inherently breeds, but its principles could just as easily serve the enemy's desires to inculcate its own brand of "truth." Even a century later, psychoanalysis can still be used as much for the justifications of warfare and propaganda as it is for the defiance of and resistance to those same things. But it is in the investigation of the motives and methods behind these uses that psychoanalysis proves its greatest strength. To wit, this edited collection presents published and unpublished material by analysts, writers, and activists who have worked at the front lines of psychic life and war from various stances. Set at a point of tension and contradiction, they illustrate the paradoxical relation of psychoanalysis as both a site of resistance and healing and a necessary aspect of warmaking, propaganda, and militarism. In doing so, we venture from the home front - from the trauma of returning veterans to the APA's own complicity in CIA "black sites" - across international borders - from the treatment of women in Latin American dictatorships to the resistance to occupation in Palestine, from mind control to an ethics of responsibility. Throughout, a psychoanalytic sensibility deconstructs the very opposition that it inhabits, and seeks to reestablish psychoanalysis as the healing discipline it was conceived to be.

First Do No Harm

First Do No Harm PDF Author: Walter Gratzer
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1546281045
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 825

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Book Description
The history of medicinal drugs extends back to the earliest human civilizations, when the search began for natural materialsplant, animal, or mineralthat might possess the power to cure, alleviate, or avert maladies or wounds. The quest continues still, conducted now by scientists and doctors in the thousands and in the shadow of big pharma. The story abounds with human interest, populated as it is with geniuses and charlatans, with the inspired and the deluded, with self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement. Medicine over the centuries has been pervaded by false doctrines amounting to superstitions, the causes of endless misery and numberless death, and there were truths not recognized for decades and longer. Finally, industry, and its profit motive, has become an inescapable presence, which is sometimes a blessing to some or a curse to others, a source sometimes of corruption or sometimes of dazzling progress. Which of these predominates, it is up to the reader to judge.

Undoing Drugs

Undoing Drugs PDF Author: Maia Szalavitz
Publisher: Hachette Go
ISBN: 0738285757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
From “one of the bravest, smartest writers about addiction anywhere” (Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author)—the untold story of harm reduction, a surprisingly simple idea with enormous power Drug overdoses now kill more Americans annually than guns, cars or breast cancer. But we have tried to solve this national crisis with policies that only made matters worse. In the name of “sending the right message,” we have maximized the spread of infectious disease, torn families apart, incarcerated millions of mostly Black and Brown people—and utterly failed to either prevent addiction or make effective treatment for it widely available. There is another way, one that is proven to work. However, it runs counter to much of the received wisdom of our criminal and medical industrial complexes. It is called harm reduction. Developed and championed by an outcast group of people who use drugs and by former users and public health geeks, harm reduction offers guidance on how to save lives and improve health. And it provides a way of understanding behavior and culture that has relevance far beyond drugs. In a spellbinding narrative rooted in an urgent call to action, Undoing Drugs tells the story of how a small group of committed people changed the world, illuminating the power of a great idea. It illustrates how hard it can be to take on widely accepted conventional wisdom—and what is necessary to overcome this resistance. It is also about how personal, direct human connection and kindness can inspire profound transformation. Ultimately, Undoing Drugs offers a path forward—revolutionizing not only the treatment of addiction, but also our treatment of behavioral and societal issues.

First Do No Harm

First Do No Harm PDF Author: Predrag V. Petrovic
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000822338
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
One of the fundamental principles of green chemistry is to design chemical products that minimize adverse consequences to human health and the environment. While chemists have been designing molecules for 200 years to have a limitless range of commercial applications, little or no attention has been given to developing commercial chemicals while avoiding hazards and toxicity. This book is the first to provide chemists with useful, practical guidance on how to minimize or avoid a wide range of hazards. Building on the insights gained from the pharmaceutical industry over the past 25 years on how to create desirable biological effects, the authors demonstrate how to avoid undesirable biological effects by design.