Flatlining

What happens to black health care professionals in the new economy, where work is insecure and organizational resources are scarce? In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in “racial outsourcing,” relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do “equity work”—extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color. Wingfield argues that as these organizations become more profit driven, they come to depend on black health care professionals to perform equity work to serve increasingly diverse constituencies. Yet black workers often do this labor without recognition, compensation, or support. Operating at the intersection of work, race, gender, and class, Wingfield makes plain the challenges that black employees must overcome and reveals the complicated issues of inequality in today’s workplaces and communities.

With 30 years of driving Lean transformations under his belt—both in-house at Danaher and as the founder of Lean Horizons—Mark C. DeLuzio has a vantage point across a variety of industries. He often hears the challenges Lean leaders face now that they’ve been implementing Lean for a decade or more. They are concerned that they aren’t getting the results they used to, and they don’t know why. Most leaders believe their problems are unique to their company, but Mark sees more commonalities than differences. Flatlined: Why Lean Transformations Fail and What to Do About It draws on the author’s experience as the original pioneer of the most successful Lean business system next to Toyota, as well as his progress over the past 18 years in helping companies replicate what Danaher achieved. Mark DeLuzio knows you need an actionable approach to make rapid shifts, not theory. With this book, Mark DeLuzio gives you: • the reasons why companies are now flatlining with Lean; • five steps to solving this problem, no matter what your industry or corporate culture; • real talk on why your organization is probably mediocre (even if it’s making a lot of money) and how to disrupt it to make it genuinely world class; • the questions you should always be asking at every stage and level of your Lean initiative.

Since its first issue in 1985, THREADS magazine has been the creative forum where sewing and needlework experts and enthusiasts share their knowledge. Whatever your skill level, this collection of articles from THREADS will help you get the results you want on all your sewing projects--including zippers, collar points, welt pockets, silk buttonholes, and much more.

"The Anatomy of Faith" (TAF) has been authored to prescribe various remedies to the life of the Christian who has lost faith in God or who has yet to identify their purpose for living.

Flatlined lifts the veil of secrecy on twenty-first century health care and delves into the realities of good people caught in a bad medical system. Dr. Guy L. Clifton, a practitioner as well as a policy advocate, reveals first-hand accounts of needless tragedy, such as the young man who died after a car wreck for lack of a bed in a qualified hospital and the surgeon who was dejected by the scarcity of resources needed to enable him to perform heart surgery on an uninsured man. Arguing that a lack of coordinated care and quality medical practice benchmarks result in high levels of redundancy and ineffectiveness, Clifton proposes that the key to reducing health care costs, improving quality, and financially protecting the uninsured, is to reduce wastefulness, and offers a solution for achieving success. Flatlined sounds the warning call: By 2018 Medicare and Medicaid will consume about one-third of the federal budget. American businesses now pay three times as much of their payroll for health care as global competitors, expected to worsen as health care grows at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. Based on his years of experience in policy and medicine, Clifton offers an attainable solution through the development of an American Medical Quality System.

Curnayn analyzes complexity and compliance issues, and she urges health care providers to stand up to a system that has stolen the joy of serving.

"When our focus is on the church instead of Christ, we lose the reality and vitality of both. That's John Hampton's theme in Flatlining, which is not only a compelling look at the failures and excesses of the church as we've come to know it, but also a road map to explore the church Jesus promised to build. If you care about recovering a view of the Gospel and a church experience that is as engaging as it is transforming, you'll want to read this book." Wayne Jacobsen, 'Finding Church' and 'He Loves Me'. Fifty years ago, Billy Graham predicted that a time would come when millions of Christians would reject the institutional church. It would appear that this time has come to pass. For every church-going Christian in the UK, there are two who have given up attending church altogether, while in the US we find growing numbers of 'Dones' - Bible-believing Christians who are 'done with church'. The subsequent actions of these church exiles are many and varied: some try to regroup in a variety of forms, whilst others give up on fellowship altogether. Those that attempt to 'do church right' - including those groups that attempt to model themselves on biblical patterns - often end up looking very much the same as the churches from which they have fled, repeating the same fundamental errors. This being the case, is there any hope for the increasing numbers of believers who, disillusioned with church as they know it, are searching for authentic Christian community?The author maintains that true body life can only happen when we come to recognise that we cannot equate the Body of Christ with 'The Church' because such a comparison is flawed at a fundamental level. The way we perceive the ekklesia, he argues, is far removed from the way it was perceived by the first Christians, and more importantly, it is light years away from what Jesus meant concerning it. In support of this argument, one only has to make a relatively brief survey of the New Testament in order to realise that most of the features and practices traditionally associated with 'church' cannot actually be found there. The author goes on to present a more in-depth study of church history in order to identify how we arrived at the erroneous model we accept as normative today, and he considers whether the enemy has pulled off a coup of the greatest magnitude - one which has crippled the body of Christ for most of its existence. He goes on to pose the crucial question: In what could be the greatest irony of all, is it possible that Church itself is not biblical?This would certainly go a long way in explaining why so many Christians are spiritually dissatisfied; it would also explain why the church is increasingly viewed as irrelevant by those outside it. In the meantime, we are in a war, the scale and intensity of which none of us fully understands or appreciates and as a result, the church's ancient structures are crumbling; the old order is gradually being swept away, with large sections of church-as-a-thing-in-itself looking set to end, not with a bang but a whimper. All is not lost, however. We need to remember Jesus' proclamation: 'I will build my ekklesia, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it'. Despite the ferocious attacks that Satan has launched against the body of Christ down the centuries, God's people will prevail. The author suggests that there is reason to hope that a growing ragtag army - of a kind not seen since the early Christians prevailed against the might of Rome - is slowly but surely coalescing into a fighting force, one that will rattle the gates of Hell.