This book provides readers with an invaluable set of tools to convert the endless challenges for quality and myriad opportunities for improvement into meaningful and useful change. It considers how to manage primary care organisations in order to improve quality of care; how general practices are regulated and held accountable; various techniques used for assessing and measuring; and commonly used quality improvement frameworks.

Patient-Centered Care Series Series Editors: Moira Stewart Judith Belle Brown and Thomas R Freeman Primary care clinicians are often unfamiliar with new and effective methods for detecting substance abuse problems in their earliest stages and the majority of patients with substance abuse problems remain undiagnosed. Substance Abuse is written by primary care clinicians and focused to meet the needs of primary care providers demonstrating how the patient-centered clinical method can assist clinicians in learning how to diagnose this complex psychosocial disorder. This book describes how to use state-of-the-art screening techniques and how to understand and motivate patients to decrease or eliminate harmful use of alcohol and drugs. It presents the latest scientific findings and gives examples of using a patient-centered approach as well as describing specific communication skills with samples of dialogue illustrating their use in helping substance-abusing patients. This is essential reading for all family doctors paediatricians gynaecologists psychiatrists nurses social workers psychologists and all clinicians whose practices include substance abusing patients. It will also appeal to counsellors education personnel and all professionals working with substance abusing individuals. For more information on other titles in this series please click here

The Power of Colleagues What happens when primary care clinicians meet together on set aside time in their practice settings to talk about their own patients? .....Complimenting quality metrics or performance measures through discussing the actual stories of individual patients and their clinician-patient relationships In these settings, how can clinicians pool their collective experience and apply that to ‘the evidence’ for an individual patient? .....Especially for patients who do not fit the standard protocols and have vague and worrisome symptoms, poor response to treatment, unpredictable disease courses, and/or compromised abilities for shared decision making What follows when discussion about individual patients reveals system-wide service gaps and coordination limitations? .....Particularly for patients with complex clinical problems that fall outside performance monitors and quality screens How can collaborative engagement of case-based uncertainties with one’s colleagues help combat the loneliness and helplessness that PCPs can experience, no matter what model or setting in which they practice? .....And where they are expected to practice coordinated, evidence-based, EMR-directed care These questions inspired Lucia Sommers and John Launer and their international contributors to explore the power of colleagues in “Clinical Uncertainty in Primary Care: The Challenge of Collaborative Engagement” and offer antidotes to sub-optimal care that can result when clinicians go it alone. From the Foreword: “Lucia Sommers and John Launer, with the accompanying input of their contributing authors, have done a deeply insightful and close-to-exhaustive job of defining clinical uncertainty. They identify its origins, components and subtypes; demonstrate the ways in which and the extent to which it is intrinsic to medicine...and they present a cogent case for its special relationship to primary care practice...‘Clinical Uncertainty in Primary Care’ not only presents a model of collegial collaboration and support, it also implicitly legitimates it.’’ Renee Fox, Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.

Through a unique interdisciplinary perspective on quality management in health care, this text covers the subjects of operations management, organizational behavior, and health services research. With a particular focus on Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement, the challenges of implementation and institutionalization are addressed using examples from a variety of health care organizations, including primary care clinics, hospital laboratories, public health departments, and academic health centers. New to the Fourth Edition: - All chapters have been updated to reflect recent trends in healthcare including the more global focus of CQI. - New introductory chapters summarize the evolution of CQI and discuss the factors influencing the application and diffusion of CQI. - Several new chapters cover ‘hot’ topics such as the role of the patient in CQI, social marketing as an approach to CQI, assessing risk and harm in patient care, CQI in public health organizations, quality improvement in nursing, and quality improvement in resource-poor countries. - A new companion volume of case studies

Through a unique interdisciplinary perspective on quality management in health care, this text covers the subjects of operations management, organizational behavior, and health services research. With a particular focus on Total Quality Management (TQM) and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), the challenges of implementation and institutionalization are addressed using examples from a variety of health care organizations, including primary care clinics, hospital laboratories, public health departments, and academic health centers. Significantly revised throughout, the Fifth Edition offers a greater focus on application techniques, and features 14 chapters in lieu of the prior edition's 20 chapters, making it an even more effective teaching tool. New chapters have been incorporated on Implementation Science (3), Lean Six Sigma (6), and Classification and the Reduction of Medical Errors (10).

Guidelines are powerful instruments of assistance to clinicians capable of extending the clinical roles of nurses and pharmacists. Purchasers and managers perceive them as technological tools guaranteeing treatment quality. Guidelines also offer mechanisms by which doctors and other health care professionals can be made more accountable to their patients. But how can clinicians tell whether a guideline has authority and whether or not it should be followed? Does the law protect doctors who comply with guidelines? Are guideline developers liable for faulty advice? This timely book provides a comprehensive and accessible analysis of the many medical and legal issues arising from the current explosion of clinical guidelines. Featuring clear summaries of relevant UK US and Commonwealth case law it is vital reading for all doctors health care workers managers purchasers patients and lawyers.

An holistic introduction for nursing and healthcare students and professionals, this book sets out the principles, theory and methodologies required for effective service improvement, equipping the reader with practical skills to carry into their careers.

This textbook covers all general areas of knowledge required for a trainee, generalist medical administrator, and doctor undergoing training to be a medical administrator specialist. Chapters cover all the key topics on medical administration and leadership. Some of the key topics included are: health systems and policy, health law, private health and insurance, health disaster planning, population and public health, health information and technology, and health economics and financial management.Medical practitioners of today are part of huge changes in medical practice as continuing developments are happening in biomedical sciences and clinical practice with new health priorities, rising expectations among patients and the public, and changing societal attitudes. Consequently, basic knowledge and skills, while fundamentally important are not enough today on their own and doctors thus need to demonstrate leadership combined with sound management skills to drive the necessary changes required to meet the challenges head. This book serve as an invaluable resource for a wide spectrum of physicians including specialists, clinician managers and other health professionals, as well as non-clinical managers working in health. This is a gateway text for trainees in medical administration, specialist medical administrators, aspiring medical managers, health service managers, and heads of service and departments in various medical specialties.