Embracing Complexity In Health

This detailed volume illustrates the transformative nature of systems and complexity sciences for practice, research, education, and health system organization. Researchers highlight the fresh perspectives and novel approaches offered by these interdisciplinary fields in addressing the complexities of global, national, and community health challenges in the 21st century. With the implications that these emerging fields hold for health still relatively underexplored, researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, including physiological, social, environmental, clinical, prevention, educational, organizational, finance, and policy domains, aim in this book to suggest future directions in health care and highlight recent advances in basic and clinical physiology, education, policy-making, and leadership. Among the topics discussed: Impact of genomic heterogeneity on bio-emergent properties Harnessing Big Data to improve health services Decision-making of women in violent relationships Co-producing healthcare interventions A socio-ecological solution to physician burnout Embracing Complexity in Health: The Transformation of Science, Practice, and Policy is a highly relevant resource to practitioners in the field, students, instructors, and policy makers, and also should find an engaged audience among health and disease researchers, healthcare planners, health system financiers, health system administrators, health services administrators, health professional educators, and other health professionals. The trans- and interdisciplinary natures of health and health care are fostering a broad discourse amongst all concerned with improving patient care in an equitable and sustainable way.

The book describes what it means to say the world is complex and explores what that means for managers, policy makers and individuals. The first part of the book is about the theory and ideas of complexity. This is explained in a way that is thorough but not mathematical. It compares differing approaches, and also provides a historical perspective, showing how such thinking has been around since the beginning of civilisation. It emphasises the difference between a complexity worldview and the dominant mechanical worldview that underpins much of current management practice. It defines the complexity worldview as recognising the world is interconnected, shaped by history and the particularities of context. The comparison of the differing approaches to modelling complexity is unique in its depth and accessibility. The second part of the book uses this lens of complexity to explore issues in the fields of management, strategy, economics, and international development. It also explores how to facilitate others to recognise the implications of adopting a complex rather than a mechanical worldview and suggests methods of research to explore systemic, path-dependent emergent aspects of situations. The authors of this book span both science and management, academia and practice, thus the explanations of science are authoritative and yet the examples of changing how you live and work in the world are real and accessible. The aim of the book is to bring alive what complexity is all about and to illustrate the importance of loosening the grip of a modernist worldview with its hope for prediction, certainty and control.

This book is an introduction to health care as a complex adaptive system, a system that feeds back on itself. The first section introduces systems and complexity theory from a science, historical, epistemological, and technical perspective, describing the principles and mathematics. Subsequent sections build on the health applications of systems science theory, from human physiology to medical decision making, population health and health services research. The aim of the book is to introduce and expand on important population health issues from a systems and complexity perspective, highlight current research developments and their implications for health care delivery, consider their ethical implications, and to suggest directions for and potential pitfalls in the future.

In an era where instant gratification has filtered into training programs geared toward technique-driven solutions, Embracing Therapeutic Complexity takes a step back and re-introduces fundamental touchstones that enable clinicians to apply an integrative treatment model in the service of in-depth healing and growth. Using attachment theory as a bridge, this text connects key principles and practices that cut across various therapeutic disciplines and combines them into a unified framework where readers do not have to "put aside" their expertise in order to benefit from the skill sets provided in this book. In addition, this text addresses the impact that power and privilege have had on shaping our psychological constructs, and it challenges cultural assumptions and blind spots that have shaped our treatment approaches in the past. Furthermore, this book illustrates how the application of psychodynamic principles can be combined with advances in trauma treatment, thus offering a practical guide for both beginning and seasoned therapists to amplify and expand their current clinical expertise.

Complex Adaptive Leadership, a Gower bestseller, has been taught in corporate leadership programmes, business schools and universities around the world to high acclaim. In this updated paperback edition, the author argues that leadership is a complex dynamic process and should involve all those engaged in a particular enterprise. Nick Obolensky has practised, researched and taught leadership in the public, private and voluntary sectors, and in this exciting book he brings together his knowledge of theory, his own experience, and the results of 19 years of research involving 2,500 executives in 40 countries around the world.

Collating state-of-the-art developments in the area of complexity and design into a unique and authoritative resource for both the design and complex systems communities, this book is essential reading for those studying€complexity or design, €as it touches on€different themes and domains such as€architecture, engineering, environmental design, art, fashion and management.

Managing Complexity in Healthcare introduces the ComEntEth (Complex Entropic Ethical) model as an integrated bio-medical and philosophical approach to understanding how people get things done in healthcare. Drawing on the complexity sciences, studies of entropy in living organisms and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, healthcare is theorised as energetic relational exchanges between people as entropic and ethical entities that unfold around a central attractor: Reduction in elevated entropy or suffering in patients. Living entities are engaged in a continuous struggle against the tendency to produce entropy. From the cellular to the collective of human endeavours, the tendency of complex systems is to disorder and decay. Yet in the micro-activity of healthcare enterprise, people resist this tendency by expending energy to create order and sustain life. Making sense of how this miraculous work is made possible is the foundation of this book. Through practical examples – from analysis of practitioner burnout, rural and remote healthcare, the functioning of emergency departments, to government, social and institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic – this new integral philosophy provides practitioners, managers, policy designers, and scholars an effective way to understand the dynamics of daily processes and practices that link the micro of everyday interactions with the macro-trends of healthcare.

Defining the value in health care and elaborating appropriate value-propositions for health care beneficiaries poses numerous empirical and normative challenges. Different methods of Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) embedded in various interdisciplinary approaches of defining the value of health care have been established in recent years. Current initiatives aim to develop and combine transnational attempts to define an overall acceptable range for value-based healthcare interventions. In this book international scholars with background in medicine, philosophy, health-economics and further disciplines, who participated in an interdisciplinary conference in 2019 combine in-depth analyses with reflections informed by multidisciplinary debates on a pressing issue in healthcare.