Complaints Controversies And Grievances In Medicine

Recent studies into the experiences and failures of health care services, along with the rapid development of patient advocacy, consumerism and pressure groups have led historians and social scientists to engage with the issue of the medical complaint. As expressions of dissatisfaction, disquiet and failings in service provision, past complaining is a vital antidote to progressive histories of health care. This book explores what has happened historically when medicine generated complaints. This multidisciplinary collection comprises contributions from leading international scholars and uses new research to develop a sophisticated understanding of the development of medicine and the role of complaints and complaining in this story. It addresses how each aspect of the medical complaint – between sciences, professions, practitioners and sectors; within politics, ethics and regulatory bodies; from interested parties and patients – has manifested in modern medicine, and how it has been defined, dealt with and resolved. A critical and interdisciplinary humanities and social science perspective grounded in historical case studies of medicine and bioethics, this volume provides the first major and comprehensive historical, comparative and policy-based examination of the area. It will be of interest to historians, sociologists, legal specialists and ethicists interested in medicine, as well as those involved in healthcare policy, practice and management.

Using a clear, straightforward approach, this book provides a patient-oriented approach to complaint handling that can be used by all staff in an office, clinic, or system. Readers will learn how to develop a system for documenting patient complaints and comments, As well as strategies for monitoring and analyzing the information documented by patient claims. Other tools include a mechanism for changing behaviors of health care providers and improving delivery systems, strategies for dealing with difficult and abusive patients, and sample scripted transcripts for dealing with the most common types of complaints heard by health care practitioners. With a solid service recovery system in place, health care organizations and practices can meet accreditation agency standards for grievance processes, and, As a result, greatly reduce risk management claims. Resolving Patient Complaints: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Service Recovery provides managers, physicians, and employees with the skills and tools necessary to implement a service recovery process to respond to and review patient complaints and concerns about quality of care. Author Liz Osborne draws on her 15 years of experience as manager of a patient relations department in a large HMO to give expert advice on addressing patient dissatisfaction appropriately and effectively.

We all rely on doctors and they go through one of the most vigorous training regimes on the planet, but it wasn't always this way. The tremendous scale of medical ethics which now exists has benefited doctors and wider society, but few know how these rules came to be. Andreas-Holger Maehle, Professor of History of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Durham University's Department of Philosophy, Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, and Wolfson Research Institute, has written this engaging and often riveting history of British medical ethics. From communication with patients all the way through to hard moral choices, this book will provoke debate amongst doctors, nurses, lawyers, academics and other interested people all around the world.

England's New Poor Law (1834) transformed medical care in ways that have long been overlooked, or denigrated, by historians. Sickness in the Workhouse challenges these assumptions through a close examination of two urban workhouses in the west midlands from the passage of the New Poor Law until the outbreak of World War I.By closely analyzing the day-to-day practice of workhouse doctors and nurses, author Alistair Ritch questions the idea that medical care was invariably of poor quality and brought little benefit to patients. Medical staff in the workhouses labored under severe restraints and grappled with the immense health issues facing their patients. Sickness in the Workhouse brings to life this hidden group of workhouse staff and highlights their significance within the local health economy. Among other things, as the author notes, workhouses needed to provide medical care for nonpaupers, such as institutional isolation facilities for those with infectious diseases. This groundbreaking books highlights these doctors and nurses in order to illuminate our understanding of this significant yet little understood area of poor law history.ALISTAIR RITCH was consultant physician in geriatric medicine, City Hospital, Birmingham, and senior clinical lecturer, University of Birmingham, UK, and is currently honorary research fellow, History of Medicine Unit, University of Birmingham, UK.

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some studies apply quantitative methods of corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities, others adopt a qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, focusing on particular texts, authors or medical topics, or specific functionally-defined discourse forms such as narratives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are mutually complementary and shed light on different aspects of historical medical discourse. The methodologies aim at establishing validity and reliability for pragmatic analysis, taking into account relevant contextual factors and insights from other fields, such as medical and social history, history of ideas, and science studies.