Health & Social Care books

This book describes the events, activities and negotiations leading up to the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on international drug policy. A range of respected authors from International institutions, academia and civil society organisations detail the background to the negotiations and the outcome; and possible future scenarios for continued reform and change at the High Level Review in 2019. The chapters include consideration of the positions taken by blocs and nation-states at all points on the prohibition – reform continuum. Topics covered include discussions on the importance of human rights, access to essential medicines and the role played by cannabis in revealing the contradictions and divisions in both national and international contexts. The break-down of the previous international consensus on ‘the world drug problem’ is clearly described and analysed, as is the slow progress being made to the adoption of a human rights and health-based approach to currently illegal drugs. Consideration is also given to the nations and arguments which continue to defend prohibition and its repressive impacts on national populations, and the prioritising of geo-politics over population health this represents in practice. There are lessons and examples here for international politics and national policy reform.

This special volume contributes to the rapidly growing body of eHealth research, presenting a selection of multidisciplinary studies on the role and impacts of technology and the Internet in health communication, healthcare delivery, and patient self-management.  The use of the Internet and new communication technologies have impacted nearly every aspect of life in recent years. These technologies hold tremendous promise to improve systems of healthcare and enable people to better understand their health and manage their healthcare. However, there are also risks to the use of eHealth technologies. Empirical evidence is urgently needed to examine the use and impacts of eHealth technologies and to inform targeted health communication interventions.  Chapters explore both old and new challenges associated with technology-enabled care. These include the persistence of social determinants in shaping Digital Divides in access and use of eHealth technologies, the unintended consequences associated with electronic medical records and pagers on healthcare professionals’ ability to control their work time, and how self-tracking and quantification may exacerbate gendered norms of the body and health. Other chapters provide updated information on trends in and predictors of people’s trust of health information channels, how people make credibility assessments of online health information, the role of personality traits in perceived benefits in online support group participation, and how online health resources impact people’s sense of empowerment and the use of healthcare services. Finally, chapters explore the future potential of eHealth in addressing the needs of underserved communities and guide the creation of new technology-enabled intervention strategies.

This book seeks to provide students and practicing nurses with the tools to better understand and engage in scientific arguments to support quality nursing and evidence-based practice. The nature of nursing and its relationship with science remains an area of ongoing debate, controversy and considerable confusion to both students and practitioners. For a science-based health discipline, it is something of a paradox that most nursing students have limited exposure to scientific philosophy education, which is not covered in depth in many modern university nursing programmes. This work seeks to remedy this: in providing material on modern scientific research methods, with particular emphasis on the context of practice, it presents an alternative theoretical iteration of holistic nursing as scientific inquiry. The author is a passionate advocate for empirical and pragmatic approaches to nursing, and the book provides challenging ideas to support a new wave of critical-thinking in contemporary nursing, confronting postmodern dogma with contemporary scientific critique. In doing so, this text engages readers with the art of progressive empirical client-centred care, appropriate for the development of 21st century holistic nursing practice.

This volume covers macro-level system issues and micro-level issues involving health and health care concerns for women, and racial and ethnic minorities. Topics covered include examination of health and health care issues of patients or of providers of care especially those related to concerns for women and for racial and ethnic minorities in different countries. This volume is divided into four sections. The first section introduces the volume. The second section covers women and reproductive related health and health care concerns, using data sources from the United States and the UK. The third section examines health care practitioners, health and health care, relating to issues of women or racial and ethnic minorities, using data sources from the US and Canada. The last section relates specifically to racial and ethnic minorities and health and health care. Chapters focus on Black men, on Asian Americans, on Mexican Americans, and across racial and/or ethnic differences.

Human capital is embodied in human beings. It embraces the individual’s capacity to perform and enjoy activities that provide money and/or psychic income. Health behaviour affects human capital and is itself affected by the individual’s human capital. This volume consists of original theoretical and empirical contributions to our knowledge of the interdependence between Human Capital and Health Behaviour.

There is a global appetite to humiliate or publicly shame others and this has even become a source of entertainment for many. The growth and all-encompassing influence of social media has made the phenomenon of humiliation even more apparent and possible.This book examines the damaging impact of humiliation in human society. The relationship between humiliation and shame is explored in depth with a particular focus on the way this relationship affects people’s self-image, self-esteem and memory. By using case studies of observed humiliation, the book discusses the power play between individuals, groups, organizations and nations. It shows how public shame can lead to damaging psychological states and violent responses amongst vulnerable people. This topical book presents an important and timely discussion for today’s world, not least in showing the links between humiliation, terrorism and poor mental health.  By offering strategies for responding to feelings of humiliation in a range of contexts, this book will prove a valuable resource for professionals concerned with mental health, public health, education and social care. Importantly, this is a book for all those affected by humiliation who want to take action and find new solutions for dealing with it.

The current politicized climate around immigration includes heated debate over the potential costs of continued immigration for the health and well-being of the nation. Amid the controversy one pattern that has escaped significant notice is that immigrants today are healthier than the native-born. Even more striking is that these positive health profiles are found among those immigrants who tend to have less education and lower income, factors that population health researchers have typically associated with poor health. A final feature of contemporary immigrant health is evidence of a gradual loss of the immigrant health advantage with time in the U.S. and across generations.   These paradoxical patterns lie at the center of Volume 19 of Advances in Medical Sociology. Too often, immigrant health is set apart and treated as a specialty research area rather than as a topic that is central to understanding such core sociological concepts as stratification and inequality. The contributors in this volume all leverage a population health perspective to help unravel the patterns and paradoxes of immigrant health, and in doing so, help to clarify more broadly how health dis-parities emerge and persist in the contemporary U.S.

Volume 16 of Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being is focused on how stress and well-being shape the experiences of military personnel both in and out of the combat zone. The book examines the connections between life in or after the military and employee stress, health, and well being.  Chapters in this volume include veterans’ transitions into the workplace, work-family issues for military couples as well as children of parents in the military, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychopathy and emotion, the role of stress and well-being on performance in the military, resilience and stress interventions in military organizations and the use of drugs by soldiers and veterans as a coping mechanism for chronic pain.  The book showcases the work of the best researchers and theorists contributing to this field to provide a multidisciplinary and international collection that gives a thorough and critical assessment of knowledge, and major gaps in knowledge, on occupational stress and well being with a view to shaping future research both in military and civilian research literatures.

The objective of this series is to promote theory and research in the increasingly growing area of occupational stress, health and well being, and in the process, to bring together and showcase the work of the best researchers and theorists who contribute to this area. As you know, questions of work stress span many disciplines and many specialized journals. Our goal is to provide a multidisciplinary and international collection that gives a thorough and critical assessment of knowledge, and major gaps in knowledge, on occupational stress and well being. Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being is focused on power, politics and influence. It has been widely accepted that power, politics and influence are pervasive within most social entities, including work organizations. However, research on the role of social influence in the stress process is still needed. This volume will focus on the connections between social influence processes, broadly defined (e.g., power, politics, political skill and influence), and employee stress, health, and well-being.

The contributors to this latest volume of Research in the Sociology of Health Care investigate macro-level system issues and micro-level issues involving the socially disadvantaged and underserved. Looking specifically at the factors impacting on health and health care differentials, this book is an examination of the health and health care issues of both patients and providers of care in the United States and around the globe. Chapters focus on linkages to policy, population concerns and patients and providers of care as ways to meet health care needs.