The book, illustrated with case examples, identifies and makes explicit the often diverse values of those involved in healthcare commissioning, whether as commissioners, providers or users of services. It provides a skills base and other support processes for working with differences in values held by those engaged in making decisions.

This book will help clinicians acquire and develop the processes and skills of values-based practice. The aim of most patient-clinician consultations is to improve health outcomes. Often they succeed, and patients are satisfied and empowered. However, some consultations are unsatisfactory and result in failure to improve health outcomes and dissatisfaction on the part of patients, carers or clinicians. When consultations fail to achieve the desired results, the cause is not usually a failure of evidence-based practice. Today's clinicians are trained in evidence-based medicine, educated, updated and appraised. The most likely reason why things go wrong is a failure of values-based practice – not ascertaining the relevant values perspectives and acting on them in a coherent and purposeful manner. If you rehearse and practise the elements of values-based practice detailed in this book, you will find your consultations more personally rewarding and your patients are likely to derive more benefit.

Discusses values from the perspective of different health care professionals and why teams and collaborations may succeed or fail.

Mental health is the one area of health care where people are often treated against their will, with the justification that it is in their own interest. This raises significant ethical questions and value dilemmas; questions of autonomy, human rights, power and treatment. An understanding of how values matter is of vital importance across all disciplines working within the mental health field. This book provides a comprehensive and exploratory text for practitioners, students and all those interested in developing a knowledge of both ethics and the wider framework of values-based practice. It is unique in being fully co-written by authors representing both service user and service provider perspectives. This exciting new text will enable the mental health practitioner to work more co-productively with service users within a humane and just approach to care. With an emphasis on rights-based compassionate care throughout, this book: - Tackles the issues of how mental health is understood through key theoretical debates about mental distress, values and labelling; - Encourages readers to think critically about their understanding of key issues such as recovery, autonomy, power, knowledge, diagnoses and empathy; - Draws on a wide range of case examples and exercises to help readers deepen their knowledge of values-based practice and ethics in mental health.

Offers guidance on the current debate about the value and purpose of healthcare, helping readers to make rational, defensible decisions.

The provision of care within the context of the modern health service environment involves a wide range of professionals. The health care team might include general practitioners, nurses, midwives, hospital doctors, physiotherapists, other allied health professionals, as well as receptionists and practice managers. To optimise delivery of care at both individual and population levels, team members must work collaboratively with colleagues in their own profession and others. This book, in the Values-Based Medicine series, adds the dimension of values to the more usual discussions of teamwork, considering interactions between health care professionals and how these might be affected by differences in professional and personal values. Examples of scenarios based on real-life experience promote learning and reflection. Anybody working or training in health care and who aspires to collaborate successfully with their colleagues in other specialties will find this book extremely valuable, as will educators who facilitate learners in teamwork.