This book offers a new perspective on improving healthcare that draws inspiration from sources as diverse as American healthcare history, Lean Six Sigma, patient experience, employee engagement, clinical microsystems, physician burnout, and industrial design thinking. This work focuses on the three value streams that form the foundation of all healthcare service processes: healthcare-worker value stream, patient value stream, and organizational process. The interaction of patients and healthcare workers in the context of these three value streams creates the meaningful experience that is essential to healing and to the success of healthcare organizations. Meaningful healthcare experience design guides the work of designing these value streams and improving them to promote experiences that are meaningful and healing for both patients and healthcare workers.

Compelling evidence suggests that human exposure to some toxic chemicals can have lifelong and even intergenerational effects on reproduction and development. Generations at Risk presents compelling evidence that human exposure to some toxic chemicals can have lifelong and even intergenerational effects on human reproduction and development. The result of a collaboration involving public health professionals, physicians, environmental educators, and policy advocates, this book examines how scientific, social, economic, and political systems may fail to protect us from environmental and occupational toxicants. It is an important sourcebook for those concerned about their own health and that of their loved ones, as well as for medical and public health workers, community activists, policymakers, and industrial decision makers.

For use as a text in foundations generalist social policy courses, either at the baccalaureate or master’s level, this book examines the process of defining need, analyzing social policy, and developing new policy. A clear philosophical base and a common theoretical framework underlie the discussion of each component of the policy process. Each chapter builds on the knowledge foundation provided in previous chapters to equip students with skills necessary for effective policy practice. Four themes are interwoven throughout the book: the importance of thinking critically about social policy, the benefits of using the strengths perspective in policy analysis and development, the critical role social policy plays in all areas of practice, and the absolute responsibility of every social worker to engage in policy practice. Routledgesw.com now contains 6 cases; the Sanchez Case has been revised to include much more policy content. Instructor materials include extra readings, PowerPoints, test questions, annotated links, syllabi, and EPAS guidelines. As with the third edition, instructors can choose chapters relevant to their course and custom publish them at www.routledge.customgateway.com

There are only a few areas in human nutrition and metabolism where biomarkers are routinely used to predict health and functional outcome. For instance, of the four major nutritional deficiencies, only iron deficiency can be precisely diagnosed by employing biomarkers. They therefore play a limited role in research and decision making, and intervention strategies are still mostly targeted at the population level. What is needed at this stage are biomarkers that are predictive of later functional health and that stay stable from infancy to childhood and adult health. Moreover, individual variability must be considered, taking into account the complexity of foods, lifestyle, and metabolic processes that contribute to health or disease. These factors present significant challenges when it comes to personalizing dietary advice for healthy or diseased individuals. This book focuses on the values and limitations of traditional nutritional biomarkers and on opportunities for new biomarkers. Contributions are divided into three parts: Methodologies with regard to global epidemiology; applications/end users, and future horizons. The main goal is to review recent developments and predict how exciting new technologies could be used to drive advances in nutrition-related health care.