Better Health in Harder Times: Active Citizens and Innovation on the Frontline

Description

For years the NHS has been the most trusted of public institutions and the envy of many around the world. But today there is turmoil. Painful shortcomings in clinical care and patient experience, together with funding cuts, threaten to dig deep into service levels and standards. Seventy years of technically advanced medicine provided free to the population has produced a widespread perception of patients as passive consumers of health care. This book explores how we may renew for our times the collective compact that created our public services in the 1940s. Voices from service users and service providers show how this can be done. They offer testimony of what goes wrong and what can be put right when working together becomes the norm. Sections explore new ways of living and working with long-term conditions, more meaningful and effective approaches to service redesign, use of information technology, leadership, co-production and creating and accounting for quality. Accessible to a wide range of readers, with short, accessible contributions, this is a book to provoke and inspire.

Celia Davies is Professor Emerita of Health Care at The Open University. She is a sociologist with a longstanding interest in ways of working in the health professions and more recently in patient and public engagement. She carried out a pioneering small study of lay members on health professional regulatory bodies in 2000, has recently audited one of its public consultation procedures for the GMC, and is now herself a lay member on the General Pharmaceutical Council. She was co-author of Citizens at the Centre: deliberative participation in healthcare decisions (Policy Press 2006 - a study of the establishment of the Citizens Council at NICE. Ray Flux has worked as an independent consultant on the interface between clinical professions and services and the people who use or work in conjunction with them, for more than 20 years, following 10 years at the King's Fund. He works to develop partnerships and dialogue in health economies at local and regional levels, combining process design, facilitating and analytical skills in attempts to promote mutual understanding of different facets of fulfilling potential for high quality healthy lives and possible collaborations for doing this. He writes extensively for clients within his portfolio of projects. He is currently director of Civil Eyes Development Ltd and works in a variety of collaborative teams and networks. Mike Hales addresses innovation in technical-professional domains, including healthcare (as an NHS service user), from a perspective of self-management and the bottom-up, participatory design of work practice and technology. He is author of Living thinkwork: where do labour processes come from? and Science or society: the politics of the work of scientists. Jan Walmsley is Visiting Professor Leadership and Workforce Development at London South Bank University and Visiting Professor in the History of Learning Disability at the Open University and formerly Assistant Director at The Health Foundation. She runs her own independent research consultancy. She was a close associate of Bob Sang, with whom she developed ideas about bringing leadership development in health care and active citizenship into closer alignment. Her most recent books are Community Care in Perspective: Care, Control and Citizenship (Palgrave 2006), co-edited with John Welshman, and Towards a Good Life for People with Intellectual Disabilities (Policy Press 2010), co-authored with Kelley Johnson.

"This invaluable text will ensure that the current political rhetoric 'no decision about me without me' will become the inclusive, collaborative reality, so urgently required in the current austere health economy." Roswyn Hakesley-Brown CBE, Chair, The Patients Association "A wealth of fascinating and insightful reflections on the relationship between people and their healthcare. A must-read for all: the `usual suspects' and those coming new to the field, particularly those charged with taking this agenda forward in today's NHS." Sally Brearley, Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences, Kingston University and St George's University of London